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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23901454">Magnus Is The Shadowhunters Multi-Verse Bicycle: A One-Shot Collection</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving'>starkraving</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Shadowhunters (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Multi, Multiple Pairings, One Shot Collection</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 17:35:28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>37,443</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23901454</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>At one point I said aloud to people, "Magnus Bane is so charismatic and shippable you can say any random character or characters and I can probably posit a situation or universe where that would be a THING." And then I had to put my writing where my mouth was. So here is a collection of random pairings (too many to list without being obnoxious) prompted to me by random people on the internet.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>56</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Magnus/Meliorn</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Magnus/Meliorn ? Btw I read a very good fanfic about Simon/Magnus, I don't ship it but in the fanfic I shipped them. Fanfic writers can make me ship anything (except creepy ship)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Meliorn meets the warlock young, as an unformed creature, faintly feral and still molten from whatever kiln forged him. Even then, young enough that immortality is yet theoretical to him, he is beautiful. As he will be a hundred years from now, two-hundred years from now, one-thousand years from now and it’s somewhere in that infinite and tenuous future that one of the fey may envision and fall in love with a possibility. </p>
<p>At the time Meliorn meets him, he is serving the Prince of Gray Castle, a far cousin to the Seelie Queen, and granted the favor of Meliorn’s personal service at the behest of the Queen alone. It’s this Prince that tasks his cadre with seducing and stealing away of the warlock in the night and it is within Meliorn to be annoyed at this chore. Fetching pretty things for bored royalty is not the work his Queen sent him to do. </p>
<p>He is less annoyed when their target, even stupendously drunk on wine, realizes that he’s being pulled through the veil and promptly sets himself (and the knight restraining him) on fire. Then he turns himself into a five-hundred pound tiger and mauls Velark and Terva and suddenly things are very interesting. </p>
<p>“Hmm,” says Meliorn, deftly side-stepping as Terva goes flying past him and slams into a tree. He admits that, while somewhat inelegant and not particularly sound as a battle tactic, that turning into ferocious animal and just tearing your enemies apart has a certain artistic flare. Then he sheathes his blade and holds two empty hands, unafraid as the beast stalks toward him. “Be calm, beautiful one. You’ve won the battle. You have my word.”</p>
<p>The tiger that is not a tiger twitches its ears, strange yellow eyes roving across Meliorn’s face before, finally, closing. Then the tiger stands up and by the time it’s done standing up, it’s a cat-eyed young man with dark skin and thick black hair, looking rumpled and breathless in an expensive red-dye overcoat. There’s also an incredible amount of blood soaking everything from his chin, down his bare throat, and sopping his shirt to it sticks to his chest. </p>
<p>“Try that again,” he says, spitting fey blood on the ground, “and you will regret it.” </p>
<p>His eyes don’t change. They remain gold, faintly lit in the darkness. </p>
<p>Meliorn smiles. “The attempt is done. I apologize. Please. Forgive our rudeness.” He touches the metal of his breast plate. “I am Meliorn.” He gestures, open palmed, to the warlock. “You are?”</p>
<p>He thinks about it. Then, “Magnus Bane.”</p>
<p>Meliorn can feel, immediately, that is not his given name. A shame. If he’d had that at least, there may be all manner of snare yet to catch him. Oh well. Meliorn bows at the waist, like it would to any member of his court, and offers the warlock his hand.</p>
<p>“Let me repay you for the insult we’ve dealt you. I will take you back through the veil to Jakarta. It will be the same night that you left it, I swear to you.”</p>
<p>The warlock hesitates. He’s looking for the loophole in his words where the poisonous truth must lie. He seems very young in a moment of uncertainty. His skin is tacky with sweat, the kohl dust around his eyes deeply smudged. He wipes his bloody chin with his sleeve and paces to Meliorn’s right, keeping distance between them. His head is angled. </p>
<p>“Will you leave me there dead?” Magnus asks. </p>
<p>“No.” Meliorn move left, slowly, so they’re circling each other in a slow, predatory rotation. “I will return you safely home. Whole and healthy as you are now and I will not take revenge on you because I see no insult here. I do not wish you harm.”</p>
<p>“You attack me, kidnap me, try to steal me to the Seelie Realm, then swear you wish me no harm?”</p>
<p>“Because I don’t,” Meliorn says easily. “In fact, I find you stunning. Too lovely by far for the court of my master, so after I see you home, I will return to the court of Gray Castle and unseat its ruler. For your sake. That way, he may never think of you again.”</p>
<p>Magnus stares, seemingly frozen, before backing warily away. “This is a trick, I just can’t see it,” he says. </p>
<p>“It’s not a trick. I cannot lie.” Meliorn again offers Magnus his hand. “I am enamored.”</p>
<p>“You’ll take me back through the veil? Right now?” </p>
<p>“I swear.”</p>
<p>“You said you’re enamored with me? Wouldn’t that suggest you’re even more likely to trick me? I know what Seelie do with warlocks they favor. I won’t be mad and locked away in some sterile dimension. Rotting for eternity.”</p>
<p>“Never,” Meliorn swears, his hand closed over his heart. “I would never do that to you and I would destroy any soul, immortal or otherwise, that tried.”</p>
<p>Magnus is giving him a strange look, somewhere between intrigued and wary. There’s almost a smile on his bloody lips and he keeps looking Meliorn up and down. His hands hang at his sides, a soft glow of light banked in his fingers, an ocean of magic dammed behind the creases of his palms. </p>
<p>“I don’t believe a word you’re saying,” Magnus says. </p>
<p>“If I steal you to my realm, it will be because you want me to. That is all. But that night is not this night. I have thousands of nights, hundreds of seasons, all the time in world to steal you, Magnus Bane. Why would I rush in this very instant and spoil the pleasure of such efforts?”</p>
<p>Magnus considers him once more, a spark of demon-light behind his eyes. Then he takes Meliorn’s hand and together they walk back out into the night of Jakarta. </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Magnus/George</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: magnus/george? Magnus being involved a mortal war in itself is p interesting. Also like of course he was. (omly if u wanna of course)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s a tradition, when <em>The Lone American </em>makes dock in the port of London, that George Ramirez disembarks from his ship and heads straight to the heart of the city. He makes certain to stop by a bathhouse or make use of a friend’s sink and soap, scrub the rind of sea salt from his skin. He shaves a little, unpacks the only clean sweater, trousers, and shoes he has after a long time at sea. He packed them very particularly, wrapped in a witch’s charm and wax paper to keep it neat. <em>Brujería</em>isn’t respected the way warlock magic is respected, or known the way the Salem witches are known, but George doesn’t think much of that.</p>
<p>He’d be <em>brujo </em>himself if he had the disposition. But he doesn’t and so…</p>
<p>He heads down a side alley, one seemingly invisible to those not looking for it, the faintest breath of a glamore, a hint of illusion that smells faintly copper to him, like the smell off metal when it gets hot. Down this alley, there is color in the old brick walls, painted in by hands that know the world below. Downworlder hands painting Downworld murals. George ducks into a doorway recessed into the wall, heavy oak that swings open when he knocks and says, “I’m looking for monkshood and silver.”</p>
<p>It’s a vampire bar, after all, and not friendly to werewolves.</p>
<p>But he’s not here for werewolves.</p>
<p>He’s here for the man in the back room, behind the old oak door with Seelie runes carved in the wood. He moves to knock, but the heavy door swings open all on its own and Magnus Bane looks up from his desk to blink at him. Then, registering the familiar face, he smiles and stands. So just like that, all the weeks at sea slip easily from George’s shoulders. He’s light as a sunbeam now, growing lighter as one of the most powerful warlocks in Europe gives him a disapproving look and folds his arms.</p>
<p>“You can’t come here every time you make port,” says Magnus.</p>
<p>“I’ll come here as many times as necessary,” says George, tipping his cap just a little. “And if I should fail after all in winning you over, then it’s the memory I take back to the States.”</p>
<p>Magnus sighs. “This is a bar full of Belcourt vampires. You shouldn’t try to seduce me with so many still near.” He gives George a warning look as he circles away to grab a bottle of scotch and two glasses. “You’ll get yourself bloody well murdered and you know I’m not quite joking. If someone gets the notion you’re serious that could be the end of you, my lone American, and that would be a shame.”</p>
<p>George smiles. “When’ll you let me do it?”</p>
<p>“Do what?” Magnus says, pouring drinks.</p>
<p>“Steal you away to America.”</p>
<p>Magnus, in the process of pouring, almost spills the lot. He clears his throat loudly and puts the bottle down, then gestures with one hand so the door slams shut. He turns angrily on George.</p>
<p>“Alright. That was fun. Now listen very closely, you cannot say those kinds of things even in jest. It’s one thing to flirt with me, it’s quite another to threaten removing me from the country.”</p>
<p>“I’m not jestin’.” George should probably stop smiling like an idiot, but he can’t. So he just smiles while he makes his grand gestures. “You ever want off this damp island, just say so and I’ll take you to the New World, darlin’.”</p>
<p>Magnus looks faintly panicked now. “George. You’re not in love with me and even if you were, I’m with Camille. Like I’ve been for the past twenty years and that’s not—” he sighs— “not changing any time soon. So… have a drink.” He hands the glass to George and kind of tips his own glass in a toast. “And just enjoy the company until you head back to sea. Alright? You must have stories for me.”</p>
<p>George considers the warlock, just sitting there, leaning against his desk, dressed in a bespoke suit so expensive it’s probably worth more than everything George owns. So he finishes his drink in one go and sets the glass aside. Magnus, huffing, follows his lead. He shoots two fingers of scotch like they’re in a pub with whiskey. Then he reaches for the bottle again – so he misses it when George crosses the last long step between them, hook two fingers under his chin and tugs the warlock’s face up.</p>
<p>Magnus drops his glass but it never hits the floor, disappearing and reappearing on a shelf.</p>
<p>His mouth is soft, warm, and parted on the beginning of a protest which dies under the sweep of George’s tongue, lifting the words from his lips like ink not yet dried. He makes a low sound in his throat. Before Magnus can remember all the very good reasons why he forbade this thing exactly, George gathers the immortal’s head in his hand and cradles his neck, kissing him harder, more deeply, the way he’s been imagining all these months away. Magnus tastes like the scotch he just drank, like skin, like any other man but he’s not that at all—</p>
<p>And Magnus shoves him away. Firmly, not roughly, pushing him back a step.</p>
<p>“You can’t,” Magnus says coolly, “keep doing this.”</p>
<p>“First of all, I can if you let me. And second of all, I have to.” He gives up a lopsided grin. “One day you might say ‘yes’.”</p>
<p>“I won’t,” Magnus says. “And I don’t like people who ignore me when make it very clear what I want.”</p>
<p>“I know. One soulmate at a time kind of man, but you what I don’t like? I don’t like seeing you fading every time I come back.” George raises a hand and Magnus lets him, lets him brush the back of his fingers across his cheek. “Every time, I tell myself you know that I’ll leave you alone if you seem happy.”</p>
<p>“I am happy,” Magnus says quietly.</p>
<p>“Then you want me to sail away? Leave you alone for good? Never offer you safe harbor in some other place? You’ll be okay without me or someone like me?” He lowers his hand. “I come in here making grand gestures because it’s fun… but also cuz I think, one day, you’re gonna really want to put an ocean between you and here.”</p>
<p>Magnus says nothing, then, “Maybe one day, George. But not today.”</p>
<p>George smiles. “Then next time.”</p>
<p>Magnus sighs and fetches that bottle of scotch. “You might wait your whole life, George. Don’t hold out for me.”</p>
<p>“Thanks for the warning,” George says while quietly vowing to wait however long it takes.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Dot/Magnus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Dot/Magnus ? (btw I love your Meliorn/Magnus and I always wanted to write about them but I find hard to picture Meliorn mostly because he's a seelie knight and they are very ... complex)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s like this: Everything in moderation. Ice cream, drugs, sex, booze, sunshine, cigarettes, magic, and long-term relationships. Dorthea Rollins has been alive long enough to get comfortable with the idea that true love (like happiness) is a thing that ebbs and flows, comes and goes. She hates that notion purely because it’s stance used by bastard to justify their walking out, but at the root of it is a seed of good sense. There isn’t a thing good, bad, or glorious that can’t become a torment on a long enough time line and the fact is they have very, very long timelines.</p><p>“I just don’t understand it,” Magnus is saying, loudly, because he’s a little too drunk and little too high and little to lonely to keep his volume down. “Why does everyone want what I can’t give them? I’m up front. I say what I mean, generally. Think. I am not actually that coy when we get down to brass tacks.”</p><p>The most powerful warlock on the Eastern Seaboard lies spread eagle on the floor of her apartment, staring forlornly at the ceiling with his hair touch-wrecked and a terribly sad look on his lovely face. it’s a very Magnus Bane thing to be doing if you know Magnus well enough that he’ll literally collapse on your floors in a heap of melodrama. He has to be quite tispy to get <em>this </em>dramatic, but it’s in his blood to be over the top apparently,</p><p>Dot puts a glass of cold water down by his head and squats down to pat his hair fondly.</p><p>“That sucks, man,” she says.</p><p>Magnus sticks his tongue out at her. “You’re terrible. You don’t pity me at all.”</p><p>“No, I don’t. The last thing you need is pity. What you need is something simple for a while because you’re too much of a mess to play well with others apparently.” She sits cross-legged at the top of his head, playing with Magnus’ hair which has the effect of lulling her dramatic guest to a kind of noncommittal doze. “When was the last time you dated an immortal, rather than taking up some poor mortal’s time?”</p><p>Magnus opens his eyes and looks up at her.</p><p>“That’s not what you think I do is it?”</p><p>“Not on purpose. But it tends to happen,” she says, gently but not without scolding. “You feel obligated to stick with mortals because you already took too much of their time and they can’t have it back. It’s not like immortals. You can waste someone’s time for a century, hate each other another century, then kiss and make up a few decades later.”</p><p>Magnus sighs. “My immortal relationships all seem to turn on me.”</p><p>“That’s because you dated Camille Belcourt and she’s crazy.”</p><p>“Still, what sane immortal would put up with me?”</p><p>Dot settles her hands on either side of Magnus’ head and leans over him. “Magnus.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>She leans down and stares exasperated down at him, then kisses his forehead. When he doesn’t protest, she kisses the end of his nose. When he still doesn’t protest but kind of looks hopefully up at her, she smiles and carefully angles her head to kiss him upside down, but warmly on the lips. She giggles because it doesn’t quite work and he ends up laughing into her mouth. Then they’re both laughing and all at once he reaches back and –</p><p>Everything in moderation.</p><p>A ten-year relationship means a lot to a mortal. It means a lot to an immortal too, actually, and Dorthea can’t be sure that this thing will last but while it’s good it’s good and maybe, possibly, it will be good long enough to call forever. Here’s the thing: she’s simple for a warlock. Magnus is a creature composed of high tragedy and destined, she suspects, for a cataclysmic fate. But his hair smells nice and his voice is sexy. He has great taste in music and an easy sense of humor. He watches her back without her asking and seems surprised when she watches his.</p><p>“My life would be a boring tragedy without you,” he says.</p><p>Two hundred years later she’s going to say that line back to him.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Meliorn having a secret vow to one day seduce Magnus is kind of funny from the perspective that he decided this low-key like a century ago and has been playing the ultimate long game because he’s like 3000 years old and he’s got time for this guy to calm the fuck down before he makes a move.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Simon/Magnus/Camille</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Simon/Magnus/Camille ? not sure if it's healthy for Simon and Magnus but if you are interesting</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Magnus is in Seattle and Simon suspects why but he won’t ask. It’s been three hundred years since New York, long enough for Simon to settle into his immortality and long enough that he and the warlock have come to rely on one another in time of trouble and times are troubling these days for Magnus Bane. He shows up on the steps of the St. Lewis Hotel – the biggest vampire den in International District, ostensibly Simon’s den, ostensibly his home, ostensibly a majority of his clan – and he looks like hell.</p>
<p>“Magnus?” Simon gestures for the other vampires manning the door to leave him. “You look like crap. What happened?”.</p>
<p>“Nothing good,” Magnus says, looking like he needs a five-shot espresso and a hug.</p>
<p>Simon doesn’t have espresso, but he can do hugs. So he carefully loops his arms around the warlock, who is actually quite a bit taller than him, and hugs him before his tired brain can register that’s what Simon is doing. He’s a little surprised when Magnus doesn’t get annoyed or pretend to get annoyed like he’d assumed he would, but rather sighs and leans into the pressure, letting Simon press the breath out of him just a little, in that way Simon know he kind of enjoys.</p>
<p>“I thought you were still mad at me?” Simon murmurs.</p>
<p>“I am, I’m just too tired for that,” Magnus says.</p>
<p>They separate and Simon studies the warlock. He’s not wearing any makeup, his hair’s a damp wreck shaved into mostly a mohawk at this point, his eyes bloodshot, and he has this faint scent of copper and iron filings about him. All signs of magic exhaustion, that he’s been pour magic into something or someone and Simon’s heard the rumors, but doesn’t yet want to ruin things so…</p>
<p>“I have open suites. Or you can crash in the guest room in my loft but…” He kind of trails off.</p>
<p>“But Camille is here, I know.”</p>
<p>“How do you know?”</p>
<p>“Because I called her and she told me to come here to hide out until this thing blows over. She also offered up the guest room in the loft and the fact she hasn’t already told you, suggests that she’d like to make this awkward. Or she wanted to see what you’d do on your own, so thank you I suppose for being independently generous with my plight.</p>
<p>“Oh,” Simon says. Then, “Dammit, Camille.”</p>
<p>“I’m too tired to be irritated about that either,” Magnus says. “I’ll sleep on the floor if you don’t offer me something very immediately, Mr. Lewis.”</p>
<p>Magnus is passed out in their guest room by the time Camille gets back from her meeting at the Seattle Institute. They stand quietly in the doorway while he sleeps, all the lights in the loft turned off but in no way impeding their view of the warlock who’s still mostly dressed, sprawled in a tangle of pillows and comforter. He hadn’t bothered to get under the sheets. Rather just passing out immediately on contact with the mattress.</p>
<p>“What happened?” Simon asks softly.</p>
<p>“He killed a squad of shadowhunters. He’s been portaling werewolves and warlocks out of Bangladesh. The Clave’s gone rogue down there, but the investigation is still ongoing. He’ll need to hide out until he’s cleared.”</p>
<p>There’s a pause.</p>
<p>“You should tell him,” Camille says eventually. “If he’s going to be staying with us, you should tell him.”</p>
<p>“What? That I’m lame and I’ve had a weird crush on him for the last century? No. Christ. It took him a century just to stop being mad about you and me. I think he still hasn’t gotten over Alec. Just… no.” Simon huffs quietly. “No.”</p>
<p>Camille sighs.</p>
<p>“Darling, even immortals don’t have all the time in the world.” And after a silence has passed, where Simon does not answer, Camille says, “It’s easy to love him, isn’t it? He makes it so easy to want him. Be careful with that Simon; the wanting can get very messy.” She wanders away from the door. “I speak from experience.”</p>
<p>“Don’t you still love him?”</p>
<p>“Of course.” She shrugs. “But he wouldn’t call it love.”</p>
<p>Simon lets her go, staying in the door to watch the slow rise and fall of Magnus’ chest as he sleeps. Magnus is probably a thousand years old by now and there aren’t many warlocks that old that he knows of. At least not in this realm. Seems so strange to have something so important, so constant to the world, just kind of passed out in his guest room like a drunk friend after a rogue Friday. Simon is three-hundred years old and looking at Magnus Bane, he feels like he’s eighteen again. Mortal again. He wonders how much of how he feels for Magnus has nothing to do with him and everything to do with him just… being familiar.</p>
<p>“Simon?”</p>
<p>He snaps out of it. “Oh. Sorry, Magnus. Did I wake you up?”</p>
<p>Magnus blinks. Simon can see it because he’s dropped his glamore and his cat-eyes glow faintly gold in the darkness.</p>
<p>“Are you watching me sleep?”</p>
<p>Simon doesn’t have a heartbeat any more but if he did, it would be hammering. “I was trying to decide if I should wake you up,” Simon lies immediately, when he was definitely watching Magnus sleep like a serial killer. “Camille is in. Sorry.”</p>
<p>Magnus says nothing for a while, then, “Thank you, Simon. I mean it.”</p>
<p>“Yeah. Of course. Just… get some sleep.”</p>
<p>“You don’t –” Magnus starts to say, then stops. There is a universe of possibility in the pause. “Good-night, Simon.”</p>
<p>“Night, Magnus.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Magnus/Maia</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>laufire asked: My fave Magnus crackship has been Magnus/Maia for a while, so if your up for it I'll love to read something for them ^^</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“It’s not about being faster,” Magnus says, grinning. “It’s about the shortest distance between A and B.”</p>
<p>“I’m going to rip your pretty face off if you don’t shut up and just show me.”</p>
<p>“I’m pretty?” Magnus says, brightly.</p>
<p>“Ugh.”</p>
<p>They’re in wolf-run gymnasium about ten blocks from Magnus’ apartment building and it’s six in the fucking morning. So Maia is already on the ragged edge of cranky and hole-ridden boxing canvas beneath her sneakers smells like decades of old blood and sweat. It’s putting a heat in her, the scent of old fights, and Magnus smells faintly of sweat himself and she’s a little embarrassed to say she likes it. He smells good.</p>
<p>It’s surprising how many people don’t smell good actually.</p>
<p>“You’re a boxer,” Magnus is saying “You were taught to box and when you’re not doing that, you’re ground game is comprised mostly of mauling. Which is fair. Mauling is a good technique when you go down, but it won’t necessarily help if you’re fighting a shadowhunter or a vampire.”</p>
<p>“I’m stronger than a vampire,” she says, baring her teeth.</p>
<p>“But a vampire is faster than a werewolf,” says Magnus. “And a nephlim with a rune is almost as fast as a vampire and almost as strong as a werewolf. They win in the middle. If you’re fighting a shadowhunter, you’ll be a little stronger but they’ll be faster. So you need better technique.”</p>
<p>“All they do is learn to fight. They’re a bunch of military freaks.”</p>
<p>“Yes. And it tends to make them predicable. That’s why we’re learning this.”</p>
<p>Maia tends to notice people in scent profiles. Magnus is a warlock so he smells like his magic, which shouldn’t have a smell but it does, like people tend to smell like what they eat, Magnus tends to smell like heat, like cooling metal. When he does magic, he smells like fire, like liquid nickel, like a fucking forge. Right now though, he just smells like himself – skin and the lye in a ‘scentless’ soap. He tends to take off his cologne around her, around all werewolves actually. He doesn’t wear anything scented to the Jade Wolf. Thoughtful-like.</p>
<p>“Show me again.” She takes a boxing stance.</p>
<p>He mirrors her, taking a light angled position, his own fists raised.</p>
<p>“Okay, you do this.” He slowly winds up and lightly throws a slow motion right-fist jab to her jaw. His knuckles tap her chin. “Full-speed. This.” He throws the punch at normal speed, but Maia doesn’t flinch and his fist stops a breath from her jawline, a whisper of displaced air like a kiss to the skin. He smiles. “You saw it coming though. Right?”</p>
<p>“Sure. I –“</p>
<p>She feels the air at her lips hiss suddenly and flinches back, but his hand is already resting against her chin. He smiles.</p>
<p>“Motherfucker.” She squares up to him again, presenting her jaw. “Do it again.”</p>
<p>He does it again. His knuckles kiss her chin.</p>
<p>“Again.”</p>
<p>He does it again.</p>
<p>“It’s just a straight punch,” she complains.</p>
<p>“Sure. But you telegraph and I don’t.” Magnus shrugs. “I promise you. Learn a good straight punch, a truly good straight punch, and the rest of it will fall into place. Just do this one thing.”</p>
<p>Maia folds her arms. “Knocked out some nephilim in your time, Bane?”</p>
<p>He smiles, viciously, and lets his eyes show gold. Then it’s gone. “Maybe,” he says.</p>
<p>Maia takes up a boxer’s stance again and Magnus takes up a defense, two palms open to deflect her blows. He looks so normal in the gym overheads, still unnervingly pretty, jawline to cut yourself on, wearing guyliner at a six AM workout like a madman, but otherwise normal. Just this normal seeming Asian guy in a sleeveless hoodie and black joggers. Maia wonders what he looks like in a fight. She’s never seen him in a real fight.</p>
<p>“Okay,” she breathes.</p>
<p>She throws a punch at his face and he swats it away. She does it again and he swats it away. Again. Swat. Again. Swat. She steps left, swings, he circles to his left and still swats it away. She grins and keeps trying. Keeps trying, Magnus patiently juking and ducking her shots, saying things like:</p>
<p>“From the elbow. Just forward. Forward. Don’t open like that.” He taps her breast bone suddenly with two jabbing fingers. A dull point of pressure that sends a pulse of heat through her chest straight down her belly to a sudden tightness far lower than that. “Don’t open up,” he says, oblivious. “Just go from here.” He shows her his arm at the ready. “To here.” He straightens his arm. See?”</p>
<p>She jabs and this time Magnus has to jerk back, her fist brushing his collarbone.</p>
<p>“There you go,” he laughs. “Do it again. Just –”</p>
<p>She snaps forward, straight forward, grabs the collar of his hoodie and jerks Magnus toward her, her hand hooking the nape of his neck and yanking him into her. His mouth tastes a little like the sweat on his upper lip and faintly bitter, caught open in a surprised breath, but she doesn’t push it. Just fits her mouth, smiling, against his. Kisses him like a question and when she feels him kind of smile back, like braille read off the touching of lips, she opens her mouth against his.</p>
<p>He laughs a little, kissing her like he’s just very pleasantly surprised at where their gym session is going, but his voice is rough with something, rawer than usual and she kind of likes that. She pulls on his neck with one hand, pushes against his chest with the other. She backs him into the ropes, presses her body flush to his and feel him shiver. She likes that too, like how he nips a little at her lower lip, then kisses that place particularly.</p>
<p>“Did you see that one coming?” she whispers, when they finally stop to catch their breath. “Was I telegraphing?”</p>
<p>He kind of huffs, eyebrows rising and falling. “Oh no,” he says, “I… kind of didn’t see that one coming.”</p>
<p>And she kisses him again.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Maia and Magnus could easily be best friends turned lovers because she’s tough and capable and honestly a better alpha than Luke and in another universe she is the Alpha and she and Magnus lead the warlocks and werewolves in some of the sickest downworld parties ever.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Magnus/Luke</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>equusgirl asked: If you're still doing the Magnus rarepairs...Magnus and Luke getting drunk and cuddly (cuz I'm still not over drunk!Luke)?</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Look man, don’t make me pick you up and carry you outta here.”</p>
<p>“You wouldn’t dare.”</p>
<p>“You’re not that big and I would definitely dare if it’ll get your ass outta here.”</p>
<p>Magnus scoffs, which would be more impressive if the warlock wasn’t slumped down in Luke’s couch with his head fallen back, breathing through his extreme inebriation.</p>
<p>“I’m a perfectly regular size,” he says, with just enough slur in the words to assure Luke that, yes, drinking vodka straight from the bottle and almost finishing said bottle then chasing it with rosé was probably too much even for Magnus Bane. The warlock points a finger blindly in Luke’s general direction. “You are a just a Viking.”</p>
<p>“I’m black,” Luke rumbles, unamused. “I can’t be a Viking.”</p>
<p>“There were black Vikings.”</p>
<p>This historical detail – delivered with such confidence – momentarily derails Luke from his intention to dress Magnus down for getting wasted in his apartment on a weeknight, but he recovers admirably and sighs. He picks up the other half of the vodka that Magnus hasn’t finished yet and eyes it. Magnus lifts his head with difficulty, blinking at him. He looks like he got in a fight at some point earlier in the evening and if the New York Pack group-chat is any indication, there was some kind of ruckus at Pandemonium.</p>
<p>“What’s goin’ on, Magnus?”</p>
<p>“Shadowhunterrrrrs,” hisses Magnus, dropping his head back into the sofa again. He raises his hands to the sky, gesturing vaguely at indeterminate gods to fucking smite someone. Then he drops both hands into his lap and complains, “always soooo sanctimonious when they come around, like I didn’t invent the portal for them or ward their stupid racist club house for them or seal that demonic breach last summer. Noooo.”</p>
<p>He exhales loudly, blowing his bangs away from his forehead.</p>
<p>“Racist club house?” Luke repeats, amused.</p>
<p>Magnus shrugs, his head still thrown back over the back of Luke’s couch. “What else would you call the Institute?”</p>
<p>“A box full of bigots?” Luke hazards, taking a very large swallow of vodka.</p>
<p>Magnus’ head comes up at that, delighted. Luke doesn’t often come down from his place playing devil’s advocate but Magnus seems genuinely upset if he’s drunk on Luke’s couch and not complaining to Catarina. Usually, if he’s at Luke’s place, then something kind of substantial happened and he doesn’t want to bother a warlock about it because a warlock won’t also have advice from the perspective of an insider.</p>
<p>“They give you some bullshit about reasonable search of the premise? Demon sign?”</p>
<p>“Yes!” Magnus despairs. “I helped design the ocular interface for that rune. Why do none of these children know their history?” He gestures all up and down himself. “I’m a living piece of history. I’m standing right in front of them—hundreds of years old, Luke—listening to baby shadowhunters try to bullshit their way into my club!”</p>
<p>“I guess that went badly for them.”</p>
<p>“One of them—ha, you’ll love this—one of them tried to lay hands on me when I told them to get out.”</p>
<p>“Oh.”</p>
<p>“Yeah.”</p>
<p>“They call you down to the Institute then?”</p>
<p>“I declined their invitation to sit in an interrogation room and explain why I lightly ruffled a few angel feathers, because I’m a thousand years old and therefore too old for that shit. That’s why I’m here. Laying low.”</p>
<p>“And getting drunk.”</p>
<p>Magnus shrugs and Luke finishes off the rest of the vodka, then moves to take a seat next to the warlock, dropping his weight into the couch with a sigh. He side-eyes Magnus, who has his eyes closed and is breathing slowly through his mouth in a way that suggests he’s focusing on stopping the room from spinning. Luke knows enough about Magnus’ history with shadowhunters to surmise he’s not having a good night being at odds with vaguely para-militarized nephilim but too furious to give them the satisfaction of knowing.</p>
<p>“It’ll blow over. It’s more trouble than it’s worth to go after you over jay-walk level bullshit.” He swats Magnus’ shoulder. “Even back in the day, when I was doing the block patrols, no one wanted to cross you. Even when we knew you were up to some shit, we didn’t want to stir it up because it would be such a headache.”</p>
<p>“Your generation was smarter,” Magnus grouses.</p>
<p>“My generation was a bunch of half-cocked punks who almost unleashed Armageddon. At least these kids are trying to bullshit their way into your club rather than kicking the door down.”</p>
<p>“I’m not going to be <em>grateful</em> to them for not breaking into my place of business.”</p>
<p>“Of course not, I’m just saying.”</p>
<p>Magnus groans. “I’m sick and tired of this. One generation fucks it up, then next just does the same thing but slightly less awful than before. It’s taken over five centuries to go from shadowhunters trying to kick my teeth in to them still trying to kick my teeth in but with, like, paperwork that maybe suggests it’s okay in some circumstances. It’s exhausting. Like it’s an annoyance to them that I’d like them to not find new creative ways to legalize killing me again.”</p>
<p>“Okay, that seems a little dramatic, don’t you think?”</p>
<p>“I lived in the thirteenth century,” Magnus snaps, “I remember what the Clave was doing back then I can be as dramatic as I want.”</p>
<p>“Whoa.” Luke sits forward, bracing a hand on his knee so he can look at Magnus properly. “Okay. This really has you heated, huh? What’s going on here?”</p>
<p>Magnus breathes out through his nose in a very bull-like way. “I’m just… irritated,” he grits.</p>
<p>Luke reaches over and taps Magnus on the shoulder. The warlock reluctantly gives Luke his full if slightly blurry attention, staring at him through hooded eyes. He’s go on some kind of smoky-eye thing but it just makes him look like he got punched right now. It’s kind of strange. Mostly because Magnus was around while Luke was a kid – a vague figure of fear and authority in the lives of young shadowhunters. The wardworker. The Downworlder that invented the portal systems. The untouchable cat-eyed summoner. Magnus Bane.</p>
<p>Now he’s a drunk angry guy on Luke’s couch.</p>
<p>“This isn’t the thirteenth century. Progress is slow, but it’s happening. Don’t start drinking the Drain-O just yet.”</p>
<p>Magnus rolls his head so he can kind of glare at Luke without having to lift his head. “You’re on their side,” he complains, not seriously, but loudly. “I don’t want to hear about how far the Clave has come in the last two centuries, I want you to call them assholes.”</p>
<p>“Okay, they’re assholes.”</p>
<p>“Thank you.”</p>
<p>“You’re welcome.”</p>
<p>There’s a pause and Luke can see Magnus drunk anger slipping into a kind of drunk depressive stupor. He himself has had enough vodka at this point to think being drunk and sad is much worse than being drunk and angry so he racks his brain for a suitable topic of distraction. Something nostalgic.</p>
<p>“Did you know Jocelyn had a crush on you when she was fifteen?”</p>
<p>Magnus snorts. “Oh yes, because my favorite pastime has always been making hormonal teen nephilim uncomfortable with their sexual orientation. Little brats having a crisis of conscious because they think a warlock’s hot.” He grimaces, reaching up to press fingers against his temple. “God, I don’t want to think about how many of them grew up with weird complexes and took it out on Downworlders.”</p>
<p>“They weren’t all like that,” Luke says, a little defensive.</p>
<p>“Yeah? Like who? Jocelyn and who else in your graduating class of how many?”</p>
<p>“Fine,” Luke says, annoyed. “I lied Jocelyn didn’t have a crush on you.”</p>
<p>Magnus huffs.</p>
<p>“<em>I </em>had a crush on you.”</p>
<p>Magnus opens his eyes then, blinks at the ceiling like he’s not sure he heard that right, then the slowly turns his head to look at Luke, who’s giving him the flattest possible look on the planet. There is a very long kind of drunk silence. Magnus points at him.</p>
<p>“Yeah, go on, laugh it up.”</p>
<p>“I’m not laughing, I’m…” Magnus sits up, squinting. “I’m fascinated. <em>Really</em>? I didn’t have an inkling at all. I can usually tell.”</p>
<p>“Well, you know.”</p>
<p>Luke regrets drinking that vodka now because in his misguided attempt to distract Magnus from the towering racism and fuckery that is the Clave, he’s inadvertently admitted (to the current <em>High Warlock of Brooklyn</em>) that he may or may not have featured prominently in adolescent Lucian Greymark’s burgeoning sexual fantasies. Which is just… you know… great. Luke hopes Magnus is drunk enough that he won’t remember this conversation or at least not draw that conclusion.  </p>
<p>“Was it because I did that mohawk thing for a while?” suggests Magnus, grinning. “It was the eighties after all. Did my punk rock look get you?”</p>
<p>Luke massages his temple. “Jesus.”</p>
<p>“The jeans were very tight.”</p>
<p>“Fucking hell – No. If you gotta know, asshole, it was this thing you did when you were renewing the wards.” Luke gestures nonspecifically. “You’d mutter to yourself while you worked on ‘em and you never noticed but… I was at the work station next to you while you did the fixes.” Luke shrugged. “I dunno why that did it for me. But it did.”</p>
<p>“Really?” Magnus says, smiling hazily. “You remember that?”</p>
<p>“Yup.”</p>
<p>“And then you had a crush on me.”</p>
<p>“You got it.”</p>
<p>“But not anymore.”</p>
<p>Luke glances at Magnus. “How drunk <em>are</em>you?” he asks, warily.</p>
<p>“Enough,” he says, still looking at Luke, looking at him very particularly.</p>
<p>Luke is drunk enough that he’s momentarily befuddled on what the correct move here should be. But before the logical, adult part of his brain with basic social skills can send the appropriate signals to the rest of him. Luke just kind of leans over, tucks his hand against Magnus Bane’s jaw, and kisses the High Warlock of Brooklyn. Lightly, turning his head just a little so they don’t bump noses. His breath has vodka on it. He opens his mouth a little and the smart part of Luke’s brain still hasn’t caught up, because he definitely gets a taste of the Rosè on his tongue and –</p>
<p>His brain catches up.</p>
<p>He stops kissing Magnus and pulls back, fast enough that he gets to see (for just a moment) the sleepy, somewhat drunk longing on the warlock’s face, his eyes hooded, lips parted in the aftermath of Luke’s exploration. Then he seems to snap out of it and grins.</p>
<p>“Well?” he asks. “Did that live up to the fantasy?”</p>
<p>“And then some,” Luke says dryly. “But I drank too much vodka. And you’ve drunk too much of everything and we’re stopping now.”</p>
<p>“Fine,” Magnus says, but good-naturedly.</p>
<p>“Sleep it off,” Luke orders.</p>
<p>“Mmm,” Magnus says, tipping over on the couch and curling up there.</p>
<p>Luke leaves him there to go take a cold shower and not think about Magnus Bane in tight jeans with a mohawk.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Jace/Magnus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Uh because I'm just fascinated by all of these, Jace/Magnus? Also love you and your words</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You can’t touch him,” Alec is saying, arms folded, shoulder braced against the brick behind him.</p>
<p>On this brick is a great arch of neon red graffiti that says PANDEMONIUM, which Jace chooses to take a sign that his gut is right rather than, you know, an advertisement. His glowering brother (by bond if not blood) shakes his doleful head. Alec is a real stand-up guy, a by-the-book kind of steely-eyed schemer of a guy capable of skirting the fuzzy edges of the law if necessary but he mostly prefers not to and leaves that shit to Jace.</p>
<p>Tonight, though, he feels the need to voice reason.</p>
<p>“You can’t. He’s High Warlock and even if he wasn’t, he’s older than dirt and there’s Writ about neutral ground. You go in there without real cause and he figures it out?” Alec makes a two-fingered throat-slitting motion. “You’re done. He’ll turn you into a toad or shake you out for pocket change. Trust me, I read his file. He’s a got a rap sheet longer than my leg. He’s basically a gangster, but a gangster that can teleport you to the middle of the ocean. You know how I know that?”</p>
<p>“He killed some guys that way I suppose.”</p>
<p>“That’s right Jace. Seven people in fact. Did you even read his file before you got a hard on for this dipshit idea?”  </p>
<p>“I skimmed,” Jace says, stripping his seraph blade and other hidden weaponry from his person. “Don’t worry. I’ll be nice.”</p>
<p>“You’re a shadowhunter bothering him at his place of business which is off-limits without Writ which we do not have, Jace.” Alec accepts his weaponry the way a man takes a dead man’s coat on his way to the gallows. “He’s not gonna be nice to you, stupid.”  </p>
<p>“I have charm, Alec.”</p>
<p>Alec’s eyes roll back so far in his skull it looks medically worrisome. “I wonder what it feels like when your parabatai gets turned into a lamppost for being a dumbass.”</p>
<p>“I’ll let you know,” he says, jogging away into the neon glow of Pandemonium.</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Excuse me?” says Magnus Bane, about sixty seconds into Jace’s conversation with him.</p>
<p>He says those two words the way a gun chambers a round or the way an ice-shelf cracks before dropping a glacier on you and your entire town. Okay, Alec was right, Jace is probably going to end up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The warlock is giving Jace this incredulous kind of stare, neutral in the mouth and murderous in the eyes which is something Jace sees all the time in his line of work, namely, being a bastard to people in the name of the Law. But most people, when looking at him that way, don’t also have the affect of literally removing the air from Jace’s lungs.</p>
<p>He chokes.</p>
<p>There’s a dollop of blue fire at the tip of Magnus’ index finger and somehow that fire is constricting Jace’s windpipe. Magnus rises up from where he’s sitting, coming to his feet and somewhere between the strobe of lights between one color and the next, something happens and a lamp lights itself behind Magnus Bane’s eyes. Suddenly, they’re gold, slitted up the middle and glowing in the razor-sharp lines of his face. He backs Jace into a wall and the fire going out from his fingers only so he can immediately close his fist around Jace’s throat.</p>
<p>“What the fuck did you just say to me?” Magnus breathes.</p>
<p>The music is deafening, but Jace can hear every syllable clear as Magnus saying them directly into his ear, like he has his mouth pressed there and is saying them. Magnus leans down (because he’s, uh, actually a good bit taller than Jace actually) until they’re almost nose to nose, near enough Jace can’t tear his eyes away from the witch-light that illuminates the warlock’s stare, like twin autumn moons.</p>
<p>“It sounded like you were asking me to snitch on my patrons, shadowhunter.” Magnus laughs, the sound rolling up from somewhere in his chest and pressing into Jace’s bones, a tremor along tectonic plates. “You have not Writ, no cause, just your hunch and your stupid fucking questions. Who the hell do you think you are?”</p>
<p>“Just a guy looking for a scumbag,” Jace grits.</p>
<p>“Your monster hasn’t been here, nephilm.”</p>
<p>“Got evidence that says different. If that’s so, don’t you wanna know?”</p>
<p>“I know what happens in my own place of business.”</p>
<p>“He’s killed people, Bane. Good people. Little girl outta Brooklyn. Your own neighborhood. You really gonna let that shit stand?”</p>
<p>“Are you appealing to my ego or my sense of honor?” Magnus drawls, fingers heating up around Jace’s throat, his skin taking on a sudden inhuman heat, like there’s liquid iron in his veins. Like Bane’s got a forge lit inside him. “Tell me.” He breathes dragon-heat against Jace’s skin. “What makes you think I care?”</p>
<p>“Cuz you do.” Jace speaks through his teeth because if he untenses his neck for even a second, Bane’s gonna crush his trachea. He’s got his fist in Magnus’ collar, one hand around his wrist and he never looks away from the banked fire in his stare. “I haven’t even read your file but the streets talk about you: King of strays and orphans. Well, this motherfucker preys on exactly that. But tell me to fuck off if you don’t give a shit. If dead Downworlds don’t bother you.”</p>
<p>Magnus studies him. It’s like being looked at by a giant predator. Magnus feels five times his actual human size, like he takes up the whole room and Jace tries to identify why that is – what part of Bane feels so fucking monolithic. He does not figure it out because before he can quite pin it down, the warlock leans back a little and loosens his fingers from Jace’s aching neck. His fingers leave an impression of heat.</p>
<p>“You’re wasting your time,” Magnus says.</p>
<p>“Cuz you don’t care?”</p>
<p>“Because like you said,” Magnus drawls, leaning a hand against the brick by Jace’s head. “If he were a killer of strays and he made my establishment his hunting ground… do you think I’d let that shit stand?”</p>
<p>Jace says nothing. Mostly because there’s nothing to say, but also because he’s considering mount Everest and the Pacific Ocean. The fact there is a clave photo of Magnus on the summit of Everest, bundled in hiking gear, grinning into the camera. He thinks how portals work, that you need to know where you’re going to make it work. How a few extra bodies frozen to the face of the glacier would likely go unnoticed if left there. Or, you know, the Pacific Ocean.</p>
<p>“I guess it’s just unsolvable then.” Jace keeps a straight face. “A fuckin’ mystery.”</p>
<p>“A cold case,” Magnus agrees.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry to have wasted you time, Mr. Bane.”</p>
<p>“It’s hardly wasted,” he says, smiling, and it occurs to Jace Magnus still has his hand on the wall by his head and his other hand is still at his neck, fingertips kind of brushing the place where bruises are no doubt forming, tracing the outline. “Meeting new people is never a waste,” he murmurs. “Particularly if they’re pretty.” Magnus smiles and Jace feels his stomach kind of tighten unexpectedly. “And give the impression they can take a hit.”</p>
<p>“I thought,” Jace says slowly, “that you didn’t like shadowhunters.”</p>
<p>“Angel—” the endearment does something weird to Jace’s stomach— “I helped draft the Accords. I think I know something about, you know, kissing and making up.”</p>
<p>Magnus is standing too close. Close enough Jace can smell whatever his cologne is. Close enough Jace can’t miss it when Magnus’ eyes drop lazily down, gazing curiously at Jace’s mouth and when he does it Jace remembers he still has his fist in the warlock’s shift collar. So he does the reasonable thing and… just… stands there, staring, totally frozen as the High Warlock of Brooklyn slides his hand to the nape of his neck, eyes flicking up to his, asking: are you going to stop me?</p>
<p>And when Jace doesn’t make up his mind in time, he guesses at it.</p>
<p>He closes the last of the distance between them.</p>
<p>His mouth is hot, his whole body way hotter than a human being should be and when he kisses Jace that heat sinks into him until he feels it like a fever throbbing through him, until he’s panting. Magnus hooks both hands at the hinge of Jace’s jaw, fingers pressed into the nape of his neck, holding him still, pushing him back against the wall until the back of his skull is pressed into the brick and Magnus Bane’s tongue is in his mouth. He’s been drinking and it’s on his breath, but there’s not a single edge of inebriation in the way he curves his body over Jace, pressing him against the wall until they’re chest-to-chest, hip-to-hip.</p>
<p>Magnus knee slides between Jace’s thighs, easing his legs apart, making a space between them where he fits himself, presses into him, trapping Jace between the wall and his body and there’s a threat in that. He should be worried about being backed against a wall by Magnus Bane but mostly all he’s thinking about is how he’d <em>really</em>like Magnus to roll his hips again.</p>
<p>He kisses Jace relentlessly, thumbs sliding along the curve of his cheekbones, sucking, then biting at his lower lip, then his jaw, then presses his mouth into the curve of his throat and when he kisses Jace there he hears himself moan, feels himself getting hard and with Magnus pressed right up against him, he knows Magnus feels it too. That’s when his right hand slides down the entire length of Jace’s body, fingertips dragging over the ridge of his ribs through his shirt before moving over his belt and over the front of Jace’s jeans and –</p>
<p>“<em>Fuck</em>,” Jace breathes, a shot of heroin heat jolting along every nerve.</p>
<p>Magnus presses his mouth against the shell of Jace’s ear, his breath hot along the cochlear nerve.</p>
<p>“Can I take you out of here?”</p>
<p>That’s such a bad idea. He should not go secondary locations with the most dangerous warlock in on the Eastern Seaboard, but what Jace says out loud is, “You fucking better.”</p>
<p>Then he’s suddenly falling backward. Because the wall behind him just disappeared and Jace hears the brief roar of a portal, pulled open without hardly a gesture from the warlock wrecking him, and then Jace’s back finds a whole new wall to be pressed against. Wood this time, paneled. They’re in an apartment, a loft, brick on cherrywood, walls choked with books and elaborately expensive-looking. Jace instinctively makes note of the entrance and exits, that they’re definitely not on the ground floor, that the kitchen is to the left if he needs to go for a weapon , the windows not re-enforced, and –</p>
<p>Magnus hooks both hands suddenly around the back of Jace’s thighs and with terrifically little effort hoists the shadowhunter up and slams him against the wall. That knocks a few things loose from shelves but Magnus doesn’t seem to care. He’s too busy looking at Jace like he’s going literally swallow him whole, too busy bucking his hips up into Jace’s, shoving him a little higher up the wall and Jace didn’t realize until Magnus did it, that he finds that <em>very</em>fucking attractive. Jace braces his forearms against Magnus’ shoulders, trying to grip hold of his hair, panting as Magnus kisses his collarbone and throat, never ever stopping the simultaneous roll of his hips into Jace’s aching body.</p>
<p>“God,” Jace hears himself saying, gasping. “Jesus Christ…”</p>
<p>“No,” Magnus laughs against his throat. “Magnus, angel.”</p>
<p>“Haha,” Jace starts to mock, but doesn’t finish because Magnus’ hands slide abruptly to the curve of his ass and he immediately grinds directly up against Jace in way that sets off about a dozen fireworks in his over-simulated nervous system. “Oh, what the fuck?” He tries to breathe but Magnus does it again and, wow, he had not been previously aware that this was a <em>thing</em>with him, but apparently being picked up and tossed around by dangerous dudes wearing guy-liner was, indeed, a thing. “You better not… better not stop.”</p>
<p>Magnus laughs. “I don’t intend to.” He smiles and for a moment it’s kind of fond, a dimming in the heat for just a second, “Unless you ask me to.”</p>
<p>“Not fucking asking,” Jace says, strangled.</p>
<p>Magnus laughs against and the sound goes straight south and Jace can’t even think straight.</p>
<p>“Alright then,” he says before, finally, pulling Jace down from the wall.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The only way this pairing exists is if Alec just didn't meet Magnus because, you know, he's a warlock gangster who teleports people to the middle of the ocean and Alec has more than one brain-cell to rub together.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Magnus/Simon</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Hey are you still doing the Magnus/ somebody crack thing? Could you write something about Magnus/ Simon maybe? Thank you!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Magnus? Magnus Bane?”</p>
<p>The man standing on the pier doesn’t respond. He’s tall, wearing an expensive leather jacket, and has this asymmetric sidecut slashed with a red striped dyed into the short section wrapping his skull. His back is to Simon and when he doesn’t turn at the name Simon is unprepared for the strange grief that comes over him – like an old wound, forgotten, until he carelessly put weight on scar tissue long past bearing it. He’s not sure what he’s mourning. His disappointment stinging him like a needle, digging into him with a brutality he is unprepared for.</p>
<p>No. It’s not Magnus.</p>
<p>He made a mistake, some trick of familiarity and loneliness turning a stranger to nostalgia. It’s the tailend of a summer day, nearly eight o’clock and the sun starting to set which means his time as a Daylighter is ending and his time as one of the Night Children beginning. Over the centuries he’s noticed a dichotomy forming within him – his day self and his night self, each sunrise and set pulling them farther and farther apart from one another. Sometimes, he worries about his other self. His day self-worries at the coolness, the calm of his night self, how readily he adapts and what, after centuries to develop, he may eventually adapt to.</p>
<p>His night self-worries his day self will kill them both in a fit of existential crisis.</p>
<p>“Shit,” Simon says. He turns away, shaking his head. “Bad day, bad day.”</p>
<p>“Simon.”</p>
<p>He stops.</p>
<p>“Simon,” says a voice he hasn’t heard in a century. “Where are you going?”</p>
<p>Simon turns around slowly, his still aching heart anxious to hope again so soon in the aftermath of anguish. The man on the peir has turned around and he… he looks almost exactly the same as Simon remembers him. His hair is longer and his style is a little different but it’s the same like of fond smile, eyebrows arched, looking at Simon like he just dropped a something and Magnus is waiting for him to pick it up. He’s still beautiful, of course, achingly so after so long and for a moment Simon just… stares.</p>
<p>Magnus frowns. “Do I have something on my face?”</p>
<p>“It’s you,” Simon says, dumbfounded. The sun is going down on his day self but the joy he feels is strong enough to hold back the night for a few minutes longer. “Oh my god! Magnus! Ha!” He’s across the gap between them immediately, hooking his arms around the warlock and hugging him so tight he very nearly picks him up in his enthusiasm. “You came back! I thought I’d never see you again! Oh my god!”</p>
<p>“Why would you think that?” Magnus wheezes. “And stop crushing me.”</p>
<p>“Sorry.” He puts Magnus back down, gripping his shoulders to just get a really look at him. “You look… great. Well, I guess you would, you’re immortal. I’m immortal. We look good forever.” He’s babbling. It’s like he’s twenty-two again. “I mean, I’m just saying –”</p>
<p>“Yes?”</p>
<p>“You’re not dead.”</p>
<p>“Well noted.”</p>
<p>“I thought you might be. That’s why… you know I thought…” Simon holds his tongue then blurts, “I heard you went to Edom.”</p>
<p>Magnus shrugs, like Simon said he got a time share in Bali. “Yes. But I’m back now.”</p>
<p>“What the fuck, Magnus?”</p>
<p>“I had to settle things once and for all,” Magnus says. “They’re settled. I’m back and I…” He hesitates. “I admit, I was feeling a little unmoored. I was hoping I’d find you, but I lost your phone number. Uh, everyone’s phone numbers actually, and I don’t think any of my old friends will want to talk to me now that I…” He pauses again. “It’s really good to see you, Simon. Really, really good.”</p>
<p>Simon is pretty sure something is wrong, but he’s not sure what because he hasn’t seen Magnus in so goddamn long. He has no idea what kind of person is standing in front of him, just who he’s been in the past, a person Simon loves very much and hazards he still loves even now but the fact is, he doesn’t know who Magnus Bane is right now. He’s looking at Simon with this… kind of longing fondness. But the sun is going down. His day self starting to fade.</p>
<p>“Sun’s going down,” Simon says, because Magnus is one of the few who knows this Daylighter affliction.</p>
<p>Magnus drops an assuring hand on his shoulder. “I know.”</p>
<p>“Why did you come back to New York? Why did you have to go in the first place?” Simon feels demanding all at once, taking his old hurt down from where he’d shelved it. “I needed you. We all needed you and you just… left.”</p>
<p>“I couldn’t help anyone, Simon. I was too angry to do anything but hurt. So I left.”</p>
<p>“You left me alone. We’re the only two left, Magnus. How could you just walk away?”</p>
<p>“You don’t get to keep me forever, Simon. We’re immortal. We have to walk away sometimes.”</p>
<p>“Raphael died and you left me alone!”</p>
<p>“You weren’t alone. You had your clan, Simon, and I couldn’t… I wouldn’t have been good company I’m afraid. I would have been poison. I had to go.”</p>
<p>The sun is fading. It’s fading and gone now, a transition happening in Simon. A sliding cool moving through him, the heat behind his hurt dimming quietly to a background noise, unimportant in the grander scheme of things. And the grander scheme of things is suddenly the place where Magnus’ neck meet his jaw, the fact there’s a tattoo there behind his ear, some kind of sealing circle and when Simon looks at it, he thinks the arrangement of symbols in the ink start to shift. So he raises a hand, brushes his thumb over the mark and Magnus, wary, lets him.</p>
<p>“What’s this?”</p>
<p>“I did something a little reckless,” Magnus admits.</p>
<p>“Reckless huh?” Simon traces the outline of the seal with his fingers, this thumb resting against Magnus’s jaw. He tilts his head, studying it. “This… is for containing things, isn’t it? This is old Edomic magic and you put it in your skin, Magnus.” He meets the warlock’s eyes. “That’s more than reckless.”</p>
<p>“I won the war,” Magnus says dryly. “But, uh, I lost that battle.”</p>
<p>“You took something out of Edom,” Simon murmurs. “You took it and you swallowed it and it’s living in you, isn’t it? Something bad. That’s why the warlocks won’t talk to you and why you’re here. Isn’t that right?” And when Magnus doesn’t move, just stands there waiting and looking at him with this raw and anxious stare, Simon feels a flicker of warmth in the usual chill of the night. “I don’t care.”</p>
<p>“You should. I’ve got dark magic living in me, Simon.”</p>
<p>“I don’t care.”</p>
<p>“I’m very dangerous. People will come after me.”</p>
<p>“And I’ll lay waste sevenfold that back on them and all their people,” says Simon, his palm sliding flat along Magnus’ jaw, tucked under his ear, skin-to-skin with the demonic seal and he can feel it’s hot. That wants to bite his palm, how near the black magic is Magnus, right below the surface. “You and I are the only ones left. I’d never turn away from you.”</p>
<p>“Simon,” Magnus starts to say, “you don’t owe me any—”</p>
<p>Simon takes Magnus’ head in both hands, bends his head, and he kisses the tattoo, tastes metal and salt in Magnus’ skin, feels his pulse in his throat rushing so fucking fast suddenly. Not the animal rush of fear, but that quickened flutter of something else. Simon kisses the ink again, kisses down his throat, feels the warlock melting in his hold because this (apparently) is why he came back to New York. Magnus’ hands are at his back, fingers digging into his ribs, pulling him closer.</p>
<p>Simon wraps Magnus is an embrace, pressing words against his ear, saying, “I’ll wage a war with you, if you want.”</p>
<p>“That’s not what I want,” Magnus whispers. “You don’t have to be that for me, Simon. I don’t want that.”</p>
<p>Simon pulls back to look him in the eyes, but when he sees them, they’re gold. Naked of glamore and he can see now, that there is something burning in the back of Magnus Bane’s eyes, deep in the dark, a hell-red glow of some distant ember buried inside the immortal. Smothered but still kindled. Simon knows he’s looking for a flinch. Simon does not flinch though. He just pulls Magnus forward and kisses him, once, gently, but thoroughly just to let him know: <em>Yeah, I don’t care.</em></p>
<p>“I love you, Magnus.” He says this for the first time in a hundred years against his lips. “Day or night, for however long you need me to. How about that?”</p>
<p>Magnus swallows. “I… I think that’s what I want.”</p>
<p>Simon smiles, his day self and night self and for the first time in a long time feels like a whole being.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>VAMPIRE SIMON SAYS HELLO FROM A DARK AND DISTANT FUTURE TIMELINE BROS</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Magnus/Catarina/Raphael</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Fanfic: Magnus, Catarina and Raphael saved downworlders from the circle.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The problem is this: It’s been almost two-hundred years since the signing of the First Accords and nephilim haven’t been the bogey-men that Magnus grew up fearing. Too many New York downworlders have this notion of shadowhunters as their oppressive but necessary line of defense. While its true vampires go bump in the night, even a vampire doesn’t want to deal with a demon. Given the choice between fighting a beast from Edom or just quick-dialing nephilim to do it for them, the preference tends to uniformly be the latter.</p>
<p>Simply put, there is (at least in matters of the gravest darkness) a trust there.</p>
<p>And that’s why Raphael simply doesn’t believe, until it’s too late to do anything about it, that the shadowhunter in front of him is actually going to go through with it until they pull a seraph blade from the air, palm it, and say, “It’s fine. We have Writ to do this.” (Meaning kill him.) And when their colleague expresses doubts, they clarify with an office-chatter confidence, “Maryse will handle the paperwork. Look, I’ll do it if you can’t. I’ll do Santiago. We’ll kill the fledglings after.”</p>
<p>“Wait,” Raphael says, finally processing what’s happening. “Wait, you can’t –!” The shadowhunters restraining him immediately shove him to his knees. “What are you <em>doing</em>?”</p>
<p>And that’s when the lead shadowhunter grabs his jaw with one hand and slits his throat with the other.</p>
<p>Raphael <em>stares</em>.</p>
<p>It hurts, obviously, but not like it would have hurt when he was alive. Mostly, Raphael is too surprised to think about the pain, stunned at the gush of blood that comes up the back of his throat, the lukewarm rush of open arteries soaking his shirt and he chokes up blood while all three of the shadowhunters – night patrol he’s called dozens of times over the last decade – calmly watch him bleed out. Like they don’t know him. Like he doesn’t know their names.</p>
<p>“You’d better be right,” whispers Riker, the one holding his right arm behind his back. Raphael bought her a falafel once after a night patrol out of a vague, uncertain sense that he should build a rapport with the Institute liaison. That clearly didn’t work. She’s saying, “If his sire doesn’t start a war over this, then this is dirty fucking work and I don’t like it—”</p>
<p>“Be quiet,” says Jones, the one who cut Raphael’s throat. He never looks away from Raphael, not now, not while he slit his jugular open. He looks… sad. “Sorry about this,” he says. Then he forces Raphael’s head up, so far Raphael can feel his slashed windpipe gaping like a Pez dispenser. “I like you, Raph.” Jones ignores the blood running over his hand. “But you died decades ago.” He sets the point of the seraph blade against Raphael’s chest, just under the notch of his breastbone. “Just relax. I’ll make it fast.”</p>
<p>And then, suddenly, Jones’ arm ends at the wrist.</p>
<p>He doesn’t have time to scream or react appropriately to his hand having been severed because then he almost immediately is ripped backwards on a tether of telekinetic force and slammed into a brick wall with such force his skull (not reinforced by a deflect rune) explodes. Raphael barely has time to process that happening before, suddenly, Magnus Bane pops into existence directly in front of him. There’s nephilim blood on his two-thousand-dollar shirt and gold in his eyes.</p>
<p>He doesn’t do anything with spellwork.</p>
<p>He just snaps forward and slams what looks like a screwdriver through Riker’s temple and straight kicks her spasming corpse to the floor. In the exact same instant, Catarina Loss materializes behind the final shadowhunter. Raphael doesn’t understand exactly what she does. The man just kind of jerks, then crumples. There’s something in Cat’s hand. Raphael’s not sure, but it might be an entire vertebra, plucked out of the man’s spine like a building block in her fist. She drops it with a clatter and says, “I’ll get the fledglings.”</p>
<p>Then she vanishes too.</p>
<p>“Oh,” Magnus is saying, strained. “Okay, dear boy, just hold still. I’ve got you. I promise.”</p>
<p>He grabs Raphael’s shoulder, clamps his palm over his gaping throat and Raphael immediately feels rush of reconstructive magic, knitting his severed throat back together. The warlock keeps hushing, softly, assuring Raphael that everything is fine. That he’ll be fine. That everything is fine even though it’s certainly not fine because there are three dead shadowhunters and the warlocks appear to have gone to war.</p>
<p>Magnus guides Raphael to lie on his back, one hand cradling his neck, the other burning with blue magic and clamped over his trachea. He keeps it there until Raphael no longer feels the sick slithering feeling of skin and cartilage stitching itself back together. Magnus peels a bloody-sticky palm from Raphael’s neck, checking his work anxiously. Healing is some of the most difficult, draining magic to do and Raphael isn’t even properly alive for it to count as healing.  </p>
<p>“Okay, okay, you’re fine,” Magnus says, sweating visibly from the rush-job he did with the healing. “Raphael, can you hear me?” He switches to Spanish. “<em>Okay, listen: you’ve lost a lot of blood.”</em>Magnus is calmly rolling up his right sleeve, baring his forearm. “<em>It’s okay. I need you to break your rule for me. You just need to feed right now. Okay? Raph? Please?”</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>“<em>No</em>.”</p>
<p>“They cut you to kill you. You need blood.”</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>“Don’t argue with me.”</p>
<p>“Not you, Magnus. I don’t want to know what you taste like. Don’t–”</p>
<p>Magnus ignores him and with a field medic’s brutal necessity, he brings his own wrist to his mouth and bites down on a thin section of skin, breaking the surface so the smell of blood is let in the air. Sweet, heavy, copper and like an addict just catching the scent of heroine off a used spoon, Raphael can’t fucking stop himself and – <em>God, please, forgive me</em>– Raphael grabs Magnus’ wrist and sinks his fangs into the warlock’s arm.</p>
<p>He feels his mentor kind of seize up, shuddering at the initial hit of venom. He bears it though. Raphael hates it even as he does it, drinking a long, aching, pull of blood from Magnus Bane’s arm, slaking the burning hollow in his own veins until, finally, Magnus taps his shoulder. Raphael hates how difficult it is to stop, how every part of him feverishly, furiously aches to just shove Magnus down and <em>keep on feeding</em>, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t. He carefully opens his mouth, easing his fangs out of Magnus’ arm.</p>
<p>“Are you okay?” Magnus whispers. He summons up a bandage and wraps his wrist.</p>
<p>“No,” Raphael says blankly, massaging his still aching throat. “What just happened?”</p>
<p>“What’s been happening all over the city for the past month,” Magnus snaps. “Valentine’s death squads.”</p>
<p>“Wait, that’s <em>real</em>?” Raphael coughs. “All that shit about the Circle? How? I thought shadowhunters were—” Raphael pauses here when, aloud, he realizes how stupid it sounds— “bound by magic to their oath?”</p>
<p>“Ha!” Magnus’ laugh is a little demented, Raphael thinks. “No. They like to say that, but it’s not in any functional capacity. They won’t get smote by the Angel if they act badly. That’s fine though. I’m feeling like I can be the wrath of god for at least a little bit.” Magnus pulls Raphael to his feet, his palm hot in vampire’s grip. There’s static on him that’s not static, crackling on the warlock’s skin, caught up in his hair and the space in the back of his throat. “C’mon. The Harlem coven will listen if you tell them to trust us. We’ve emptied Hell’s Kitchen. The Bennett sisters are turning the entire neighborhood into a ward wall for stragglers, but who knows how long that will hold. We have warlocks on standby to portal people out from there.”</p>
<p>Raphael stares. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You’re pulling people out like it’s Hiroshima.”</p>
<p>“Raph,” Magnus says, gathering the vampire’s head in his hand, forcing him to really, really listen. “Morgenstern’s the same face I’ve seen through history. Trust me. It’ll be Auschwitz if we don’t move right the fuck <em>now</em>. Do you understand me? There are no rules. They’re going to kill us all.”</p>
<p>“I understand.”</p>
<p>Which is about the moment Catarina returns with three young vampires huddled at her back. “Raphael? I found them hiding in a shipping container. Are you –?”</p>
<p>“RAPH!” One of the smaller ones, a Filipino girl in a sweatshirt, grave-dirt still in her hair, bolts from Catarina’s back and tackles Raphael, snapping across the empty warehouse and burying her face in his shoulders. She sobs. “I thought they were going to kill you. I thought –”</p>
<p>“No, no,” Raphael hushes her, cradling her head in one hand, glancing at Magnus. “We’re getting out of here, Sonya. You’re safe. I promise. I promise.”</p>
<p>The other two follow Sonya’s lead and immediately gather around the older vampire.</p>
<p>Catarina moves to Magnus’ side, murmuring, “They’re okay. Raph already fed them. They’re all terminals, coached for months before transition.” She looks sad. “I know Sonya. She was in the cancer ward at Saint Mary’s. I thought she might do this, but I didn’t know it was Raphael she was talking to.” She glances toward the huddle of vampires, Raphael speaking quietly to the lot of them. “He’s still a good Catholic boy at heart, huh?”</p>
<p>“Hmm,” Magnus says, wobbling a hand. “Someone gave up this location to the Clave. He’s probably going to rip someone’s throat out for what happened tonight so…”</p>
<p>“A good Catholic boy,” Catarina repeats with emphasis.</p>
<p>“Okay, sure.”</p>
<p>“Give them a minute, but we need to go. We have four other safe houses to hit tonight, Mag.”</p>
<p>“We have a minute,” he says quietly. His eyes are gold. He doesn’t bother covering them anymore, not lately, which suggests to Catarina that he’s settled into a certain mindset, one she knows she should be worried about. He shrugs. “We’ll just give him a minute.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>THE CIRCLE ARE BUNCH OF MAGIC NAZIS AND SHOULD BE TREATED AS SUCH. PEACE.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Cat/Magnus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Cat/Magnus (from someone you've definitely never spoken to before, and definitely understands the concept of subtlety)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Magnus has this terrible habit, she knows, of latching onto things in the moments where the world seems to be ending. Personally, Catarina thinks that makes him more human than her, but that’s not what she’s focused on just now. The dirt in their fox hole smells like blood and Magnus is screaming like he’s dying and, well, he <em>is</em> dying and that’s what should consume her thoughts right now. His gut’s ripped open, shorn wide by a chunk of shrapnel the size of her fist. It’s shredded the stolen uniform he’s wearing, laying bare a small strip of bloody intestine, the air stinking like his perforated stomach.</p>
<p>If Magnus were any more than half human in his parentage, he’d be dead instead of dying so she takes that as a win as she straddles his legs, one of which is broken, and holds him down while she works on him.</p>
<p>“Magnus,” she says calmly, loudly, her fingers digging around for the last of the metal somewhere in his large intestine. “Magnus, my love, focus on my voice.” She magics the shards into the palm of her other hand, pinching and knitting slithering organs as she goes. “You’re okay. It’s not that bad, really. Just a scratch, honey.”</p>
<p>“FUCK YOU!” he’s sobbing, which is a good sign. Magnus yelling is a good sign.  </p>
<p>“It’s okay, I’m almost done. Deep breathe.”</p>
<p>She floods his entire lower body with a concentrated burst of magic, soaking every cell and taking biological possession of their functions, forcing them into a psychotic fit of regeneration. She wouldn’t normally subject a conscious person this, but Magnus doesn’t have that kind of time and, frankly, if anyone can take this much pain in a single go, it’s Magnus Bane. Still, she has literally sit on top of him, her hands jammed almost entirely into his guts, to stop him from bucking her off in a fit of agony. He howls, cries, just fucking screams at her. He calls her terrible things in more languages than she knows. She keeps healing him. He begs her to stop, to stop, to please fucking stop but she does not stop until his eyes roll back in his skull and, mercifully, he passes out.</p>
<p>Then she finishes her bloody work in silence, contained in a small bubble of glamore, she smooths out the rips she finds inside him, seams the subcutaneous layers of his belly closed one by one – nerve, sinew, and skin. She scrubs out all sign of scarring or wound. She erases the history of violence from him sections at time. When she’s done with his stomach, she runs her hands over his shredded right thigh, fuses his shattered patella, strings the muscle in his leg back together and steals a boot off a dead Marine to replace the one Magnus lost. She searches his body with her fingers, clinical as a machine, she scours him for the broken parts and mends them.</p>
<p>He seems so small when he’s unconscious, laying slack beneath her, eyes closed.</p>
<p>He stinks like a battlefield, like his own death five times over, like mud and gunpowder. He twitches, whimpering when she combs her fingers through his blood-sticky hair, stitches his split scalp back together, wipes a cut from his cheek with her thumb. She cradles his neck, staring down at him with a dull exhaustion and she thinks: <em>He’s so pretty, honestly</em>. She always thinks this while she’s pulling him back together, that Magnus Bane is kind of beautiful, that his jawline is just so sharp, that his dark complexion is so clear, his cheekbones cut with a knife, and when he smiles he lights up a room.</p>
<p>And this, a mudhole filled with blood and shit, is where she brings him.</p>
<p>“Cat,” he groans, coming slowly out of it. His eyes flutter a little. They’re gold under the glow of artillery fire. “Cat, what’s… where’m I?”</p>
<p>“You’re okay, I’ve got you.” She wipes mud from his cheek. “Hey, hey. It’s me.”</p>
<p>He’s a little doped up on pain killing magic. “Hey,” he slurs, kinda grinning. “There was a hole in me, huh?”</p>
<p>“Yes, there was. All gone now. Better watch yourself, Bane.”</p>
<p>He grimaces and sits up, she’s still straddling his lap. He looks up at her. “Hey,” he starts to say. He fits his hands over the utility belt at her hips. He smiles. “Cat, you –”</p>
<p>She covers his mouth with her fingers, still sticky with his own blood.</p>
<p>“Don’t,” she whispers. “Don’t you dare do that here, Magnus. Don’t you dare.”</p>
<p>He blinks. His eyes are brown again. “Okay,” he says, muffled, confused.</p>
<p>He doesn’t get it. He’s older than her, but something about how his world fits together doesn’t allow him to see the facts of them. Sure, he’s probably in love with her. Hell, she’s pretty sure she could be in love with him. But she just won’t allow that shit right now. She’s not one to find the good things in the shitstorm and gather them in her palms like a buttercup in a battlefield, focusing in on the things to live for. No. Here is not where she cradles her humanity, where she opens her heart to a moment of peace.</p>
<p>No. This is not the version of herself to fall in love with.</p>
<p>God. Never.</p>
<p>“Let’s get out of here,” she says, kissing him on the forehead. “No dying this time.”</p>
<p>“Sure thing,” he says, bemused.</p>
<p>He’ll try again later, she knows, to confess that he loves her like she doesn’t know. She will stop him every time until he stops doing it. Maybe one day, two hundred years from now she’ll be able to look at her best friend of nearly a century and not see him vomiting blood on a battlefield, or broken from a fight with nephilim, or torn up by some other fact of his mad existence. She’s not a good influence, she knows. She’s another disaster happening to him in slow motion, but he just doesn’t notice because, of course, his life is a tapestry of disasters.</p>
<p>“What’s next?” he asks her, hunkering down in the dirt next to her.</p>
<p>She imagines the day he doesn’t come back to her. She thinks, on that day, she will stop being human. But for now, she says, “We go east.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>IM SO SORRY YOU GUYS. IM AN ANGST DISASTER MACHINE aND THEY ARE A BATTLE COUPLE PROBABLY. THIS IS NOT THE FLUFF AND MAKE OUT SESSIONS I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE. OH GOD. SORRY.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Magnua/Lilith</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: If you're still doing crack ships, I have a really good one for you. Magnus/lilith</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When she again sees the son of Asmodeus, it’s under very different circumstances than when she met him the last time outside the realm of Edom.</p>
<p>Asmodeus invites her to Pandorica – the very heart of his First Kingdom in Duduael which has burned like a raging star for almost five years now in the kingdom of earth. The war engines of the Great Serpent have decimated the kingdoms of hell, crushing and devouring the armies of his enemies and were she prone to war as the rest of her kind, this might arouse something in her. Desire or hatred or action. But she has what she wants already and like an indolent cat, she watches her rival and sometimes ally remake the face of their realm and then, like a dragon with its horde, lie down upon it.</p>
<p>Sometimes, only occasionally, she gets the impression he wants to impress her the way people like to impress animals that are indifferent to them. After all, Asmodeus is the king of lust and temptation. So, it must be infuriating to him, on some level, that she’s rather uninterested in him or anything he does outside of infuriate her. And the last time he infuriated her, she mauled him beyond healing and he’s since kept his distance.  War doesn’t interest her. Asmodeus and his conquering doesn’t interest her. Only the welfare of her son who, in some distant time, will recover from his injuries and rejoin her on the throne of her empire.</p>
<p>She plans to ignore his invitation except…</p>
<p>
  <em>“It may interest you to know that my own son, Magnus Bane, has agreed to join me in my kingdom. He’s been with me since the start of my campaign. I would be curious to know if you’d meet with him. I am eager to know your own opinions, as a mother, on how I’ve done with him.”</em>
</p>
<p>This is probably a trap. Asmodeus is a master manipulator after all and he’s been obsessing about ways to get her attention for a millennium and then some. But, to his credit, it’s the first peripheral matter that’s sparked her curiosity in thousands of years and the first time Asmodeus has, consciously and with purpose, pointed out that they of all the rulers in Edom, are the only two with children they cherish.</p>
<p>“Oh,” she says, to the empty halls of Pandemonium, “why not?”</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>The halls of Pandorica are forged of black obsidian and bone. Frozen in the molten walls of his kingdom are the bones of ten thousand armies of hell, glittering for eternity, a cenotaph to all the conquests of his great house and with every battle won, the forge of Pandorica roars and it <em>builds</em>. The machine city is ever moving, the black spires of his castle mounted on the back of an iron behemoth, crawling blindly across the ruins of Edom, roving the realm at the whim of its master toward whatever new battle field he chooses.</p>
<p>The city, like her own city of Pandemonium, is empty. It’s a brutal, beautiful thing really. As Lilith arrives by wing to the far western edge of the city, she can see that Pandorica’s master is waiting for her at the top of the Black Tower, watching her as she circles his machine kingdom as she did millions of years ago, deciding whether or not to attack it for the sake of attacking it. She does think, distantly, that there would be some satisfaction in turning him aside again and demolishing his fine city…</p>
<p>But in the end, she takes him at his offer and joins Asmodeus on the landing of his Tower, casting off her true form for her chosen human face. She notes with some curiosity that Asmodeus appears to be a handsome Indonesian man leaning on a black walking stick. A curious metaphor for the injury she did him all those eons ago, but she doesn’t much think on it.</p>
<p>He offers her an arm and she takes it.</p>
<p>Together, they walk toward the core of his fortress.</p>
<p>“I was surprised when you accepted my invitation,” he says. “Does the progress of my son so incite the curiosity of our Queen?”</p>
<p>“He defied me once,” she says, idly inspecting the walls of the Tower. There appear to be souls trapped, alive, within the obsidian and sometimes they move if you pay them notice. “If he’s been with you these past five years, then I can only assume you’ve put him to use in your war efforts and I admit that does intrigue me. He’s not on the battle field. He does not lead your armies. There was rumor he’d been pulled into Edom some time ago, but no one knew the details of it.”</p>
<p>“I did as I promised him I would do,” says Asmodeus. “I put him on the throne of my kingdom to rule beside him.”</p>
<p>“Hmm.” Lilith eyes him. “Will I get to speak with him?”</p>
<p>“If you like.”</p>
<p>They are descending an endless staircase, have been descending it for some time now, descending deeper and deeper into the very belly of the city, into its raging heart and in the walls of the city, she can see flame now, burning through the smoky glass. Eventually, the staircase ends and at the bottom is a door forged of filthy iron. Carved from the fused armor of a thousand fallen angels and sealed with Edomic magic so old even she has forgotten the source.</p>
<p>Asmodeus waves a hand and it clicks open.</p>
<p>“He’s through there,” Asmodeus says, waving. “Please, see for yourself.”</p>
<p>Lilith, confident in her rival’s chivalry, enters the small iron chamber and after a moment, allows herself to marvel at what she finds there. Inside, the walls coil and converge like the arteries of a great beast, or the pipes of a great machine, all joining and twisting at the root to fuse as a single point beneath the seat of a black metal throne. It’s not… strictly a throne so much as a welded hunk of iron, but there is certainly someone seated there.</p>
<p>Magnus Bane looks much like he did the day she met him:  lovely in form and function, a creature designed for his purpose. He’s probably mote flawless now that he’s been under his father’s hand for these past years, any human imperfections stripped from him or burned out of him. He’s been lashed to the throne of Pandorica. The walls still, even now, hum with the agony of the deed and she can feel, like fingers on her skin, how he’d begged, pleaded, over and over for mercy. How he fought it, how the heart of Pandorica opened itself to devour him and how Asmodeus himself had pressed Magnus into the molten throne and held him there, screaming, until the city paved a road into the warlock’s immortal soul.</p>
<p>He’s seated in the throne of metal, his arms pulled behind his back, trapped in melted iron behind him. His hands hang free, protruding from the slag on either side of his hips and she can see the silver rings, even the dark nail polish he must have been wearing when he was brought here. Utterly untouched. He’s exactly as he was when his father grafted him into the heart of his kingdom. His clothes are pristine, a black jacket and jeans, a plain grey button down. At his neck there are half a dozen cords, charms, and amulets from his human life. One of them, a small red and gold omamori charm.</p>
<p>Something about it suggests to her, it was arranged there to torment him some years ago.</p>
<p>She knows this the ways demons, generally, know pain.</p>
<p>He’s seated with his legs likewise melted into the floor, pulled at an obtuse angle, like he tried to climb out of the molten pit while it was still liquid and didn’t succeed. So, he hangs now, frozen like that. There is a band of black metal around his head, fused to his skull it looks like. He’s silent, seemingly oblivious, his head bowed, body slack.</p>
<p>He breathes but barely. When he does, the distance forges also breathe.</p>
<p>“Beautiful,” Lilith says without thinking. “Oh, lovely one, how he’s used you.”</p>
<p>She crosses the warm metal floor, aware of the how the structure pulses on a slow biological beat, a heartaching throb through every inch of metal and moving the monolith. She can see now how it’s been done, how Asmodeus has set his son into the heart of his kingdom and made him its engine, that Pandorica lives as he lives, that Pandorica is Magnus and when she finally touches him, using to fingers to lift his chin, he <em>looks </em>at her and the kingdom of the Serpent King comprehends her. A city millions of years old, recognizes her and somewhere in that gestalt, Magnus Bane also sees her.</p>
<p>Lilith is, she admits, fascinated.</p>
<p>She smooths the back of her hand against his cheek and when she does it he shivers, his eyes closing and the entire kingdom of Pandorica shudders to a halt, the machine kingdom stopping its restless march across Duduael and standing at attention. Lilith smiles. She can sense Asmodeus is gone, left her confidently to her own devices, somehow certain she will not tear out the soul of his war machine because, simply, it’s too beautiful to destroy. He is not wrong. She adores this composition of form and function. She can appreciate its rarity.</p>
<p>“Can you hear me?” Lilith asks, brushing her fingers through the warlock’s dark hair.</p>
<p>“Yes,” he says, but in a voice with ten-thousand others behind it.</p>
<p>“Do you know who I am?”</p>
<p>“Lilith. Queen of Edom. Mother of All Demons and the First of Line of Pandemonium.” He blinks slowly, eyes shifting across her face, slowly, as if mapping her features inch by inch and he says, “The day I met you, you told me a story about a solider in love with a warlock. I loved that story because it was my story. You used it against me.” He shudders, breath hitching like he’s in pain or pleasure she can’t tell but it fascinates her as he breathes through it and the city groans. “I’m here because of you,” he says and the way he says it… in awe or horror, she wants to bottle that sound and drink it.</p>
<p>“Does it hurt?” she asks, touching the crown fused to his head.</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“Do you want it to stop?”</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>“Do you like it? What’s been done to you?”</p>
<p>“I do now,” he says and he angles his head to look at her. “You’re the first soul I’ve seen that isn’t my father.”</p>
<p>“Am I really?”</p>
<p>“Yes.” He shivers again. “Please… tell me what I am now? I can’t tell anymore.”</p>
<p>Lilith smiles, taking the warlock’s chin between her thumb and forefinger, lifting his lovely face up to look at her. She studies him lazily, indulgently, feels him leaning into her touch like a cat leans into the hand of its owner and she feels… something when he does that. A low, unfamiliar thrill. She can see him, yes, the human genetics that bred him: his dark skin, the composition of his hands, the fine bone structure, the braid of DNA that determined the angle of each zygomatic arch, and the way his mouth looks when he opens it, pleading, to her.</p>
<p>She also sees the truth of him: his soul bound to the very consciousness of Edom and how he <em>burns</em> like a dark star under her touch and it’s like nothing ever before forged in this realm. Something new. Something interesting. Something she… envies and she knows then that Asmodeus is getting precisely what he wants and she can almost admire him for it, how long in the making his seduction.</p>
<p>The Queen of Edom smiles.</p>
<p>“You’re beautiful,” she says, gently touching his lips. “You don’t need to know anything else.”</p>
<p>“I can’t remember,” he says, “I can’t remember the last person who said that to me.”</p>
<p>“Do you think you loved them?”</p>
<p>“I think I did.”</p>
<p>“Well, you will never see them again. So, love me instead.”</p>
<p>“I do.” He’s breathing faster, desperate now. “Please. Tell me…”</p>
<p>“You’re beautiful,” she says. And she kisses him. She can feel the city of Pandorica start to move, that the forges are lit, are growing, burning beyond anything they have ever done before. Lilith kisses him and says, “You’re perfect.” She ignores how the machine kingdom roars, how it’s certainly growing, fed on the fire she is pouring now into its heart. “You were made for this, lovely one, and I would be envious to own you.”</p>
<p>“I think you can,” Magnus says visibly aching, wanting that. “If you ask it. If you ask to have me, you can.”</p>
<p>“An alliance then,” she says, “between our great houses.”</p>
<p>“Please,” Magnus begs. “Please…”</p>
<p>“Yes.” Lilith bends down again. “Yes, I think so.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>THIS WAS WAY TOO LONG AND IS 90% ME WAXING ON ABOUT WHAT THE FUCK DEMONS MIGHT DO WITH THEIR BORED FUCKING ETERNITY IN HELL.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Magnus/Alec & Starbucks</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: For the "I wish you would write a fic where" meme, Magnus gets kicked out/banned from somewhere. (Your work blows me away, I'm always excited to see you on my dash!)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I WILL BURN THIS PLACE TO THE GROUND!”</p>
<p>“No. No he won’t. Haha. That’s not going to happen.”</p>
<p>“ABOMINATION!”</p>
<p>“Oh god.”</p>
<p>“WHAT THE FUCK.”</p>
<p>“I am so sorry.”</p>
<p>“YOUR FACE LOOKS LIKE –”</p>
<p>“He is <em>very </em>high.”</p>
<p>“—UGLY.”</p>
<p>“Christ.”</p>
<p>Well, there’s nothing else that can possibly make this anymore mortifying so Alec just ducks down, gets his center of gravity under Magnus and just picks the warlock up and tosses him over his shoulder like a very loud sack of potatoes. There is a smattering of impressed applause from the gathered New Yorkers who, probably, have seen weirder things than angry Asian guys yelling at extremely tired Starbucks baristas. Alec slaps a fifty in the tip jar and kicks the door open, maneuvering with difficulty onto the sidewalk and praying Magnus has the sense not to use magic.</p>
<p>He gets about five steps out the door before the floor manager, who is about sixteen, sticks her head out the door and says, amused, “He’s super banned from this store, by the way. Don’t bring him back.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, don’t worry I would literally kill me to see any of you in person again.”</p>
<p>“Good luck with that, dude.”</p>
<p>Alec readjusts his grip on his boyfriend and continues to march down the street, ignoring the looks he’s drawing because he can’t get his hands free to activate his basic galmore rune. He’s not exactly sure what combination of drugs and/or booze is setting off this reaction or how worried he should actually be, but he does have his hand free enough to get to his phone and speed dial Catarina.</p>
<p>“Cat. I think Magnus is, like, high or something. He just got banned from a Starbucks. As far as I know, he’s not been drinking or doing drugs, so I’m understandably confused.”</p>
<p>A snort of laughter from the other line.</p>
<p>“Cat, I know this is objectively hilarious but I’m really worried he’s going to turn someone into a toad or something.” A beat. “Or start singing. I think either one of those things would be the worst.”</p>
<p>“Where is he now?”</p>
<p>“Literally on my shoulder. He can’t figure out how to get away.”</p>
<p>“That’s pretty high. I’ll be right there.”</p>
<p>“Alexander,” Magnus says, upside-down and desperately struggling to not be upside down. “What’s going on? Are we still getting coffee?”</p>
<p>“No, Magnus. We’re not. You’re banned from Starbucks.”</p>
<p>“Aww. Again?”</p>
<p>Alec sighs and keeps walking.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>okay technically this isn't a pairing but I needed a palate cleanser after that last thing.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Magnus/Magnus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: I’m so surprised that no one asked for Magnus/Magnus (spell gone weird or something)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Hmm…” says Magnus, circling slowly to his left. “This is…”</p>
<p>“Strange?” says Magnus, another Magnus, on the other side of spell circle. He’s identical in every way to the first Magnus because, well, he is that Magnus. They both are. He sighs. “I guess we didn’t do that right.”</p>
<p>Magnus snaps his finger. “That mirroring rune is Edomic.”</p>
<p>Other Magnus tosses his hands up. “Of course!”</p>
<p>“It needs to be in reverse—” Magnus enthuses.</p>
<p>“—or replaced with a more stable conduit medium,” other Magnus concludes.</p>
<p>“We’ll get it next time.”</p>
<p>“Absolutely.”  </p>
<p>Magnus and Magnus beam proudly at one another but then seem to recall their present situation has yet to resolve itself and there are still two of him standing in his living room. They both think (unbeknownst to the other) that while Alec would probably find this thrilling, the space time continuum will not find it thrilling. And if not the space time continuum then at the very least Magnus’ immediate magic reserves. The first Magnus (ostensibly) checks the amulet nailed to the table top, the bit of quartz in the center pulsing slowly.</p>
<p>“It’ll give out. Only has about—”</p>
<p>“—five minutes worth of power?” other Magnus says helpfully.</p>
<p>“So five minutes?”</p>
<p>“Five minutes.”</p>
<p>“What could we get up to in five minutes?”</p>
<p>Magnus ponders this, eyeing his other self with a kind of curious possibility now that the threat of immediate danger has passed. He’s seen himself before, of course, in shapeshifters or decoy charms designed to look like him but it’s… oddly, markedly different when you know for an absolute fact the soul across from you is your own. Twinned temporary, but still you. His other self is likewise peering at him with an identical curiosity and, almost cautiously, they close the space between them, stopping just short of one another as if beset simultaneously with a twinge of self-consciousness.  </p>
<p>Magnus brushes that feeling aside and moves closer, raising a hand at if to poke himself in the shoulder… then hesitates. His other self likewise flinches a little, expecting time or space or something to break at their proximity but it doesn’t. It’s somehow just not that fantastic.</p>
<p>“This is weird,” Magnus says. He steps to one side and the other Magnus mirrors him and they both kind of laugh, a little nervously, at the same time. “It’s really strange seeing yourself, your actual self.” They look one another up and down. “This is what everyone else sees.”</p>
<p>“It’s a pretty good view,” says other Magnus cheerfully. He smiles and the expression creases the corners of his eyes, has softening affect that moves through his entire demeanor, not just his eyes. Magnus is a little enamored of the effect. He wonders if others notice that of if he’s just hyper-attuned to the minutia of himself. The other Magnus is going on, saying, “I wasn’t sure about the cut on this jacket, but it looks pretty good from the back now that I’m seeing it properly. Turn around?”</p>
<p>Magnus spins on his heel and kind of does a stage pose.</p>
<p>“Yup. Worth every penny.”</p>
<p>Magnus tilts his head. His other self does too. </p>
<p>He suspects they’re thinking similar things but somehow the apprehension of reading yourself wrong (something that is entirely possible, Magnus is certain, knowing how often he fails to understand himself) is more nerve-racking than expected. He briefly agonizes over what to do. He only has five minutes with himself. That seems so odd. Why does he feel like this is a singular opportunity? To do what? Why is he nervous? The same anxiety that racks a person as they’re saying long-term good-byes, a fear of missing their chance.</p>
<p>“Do you—?” he starts to ask.</p>
<p>But his other self suddenly moves forward, like he’s been holding it back the whole time, grabs him around the shoulders and hugs him.</p>
<p>Magnus freezes, surprised. He feels his own arm tighten around his body, his hands cup the nape of his neck, his thumb brushing the back of his scalp in a way that he always finds soothing from others and almost unbearably reassuring from himself. He relaxes immediately into the embrace, eyes closing. His can smell his own clothes, his own cologne, his own hair gel on his other self and he’s not sure why that’s so goddamn comforting but it is. His other self is hugging him exactly the way he prefers to be hugged, so tightly his ribs kind of ache.</p>
<p>“You don’t have to –” Magnus starts to say.</p>
<p>“I want to?” his other self whispers so quietly he almost doesn’t hear it. “Please?”</p>
<p>Magnus isn’t sure why that makes his eyes sting or his chest tighten but it does.</p>
<p>“Okay.”</p>
<p>His other self slides his arms more securely around Magnus’ ribs, turns against Magnus’ shoulder and presses his face into the place where his neck meets his collarbone. Magnus shivers because it’s strange, shivers because people touching his neck always makes him simultaneously nervous and faintly aroused. His other self is idly stroking his hair, fingers dragging through, blunt nails dragging along his scalp – tentative at first, then more confidently when Magnus kind of sighs into it.</p>
<p>He’s half asleep in seconds, like some kind of sun-sleepy cat, completely unwound in a way he wasn’t previously aware was possible. His other self turns his face up a little against the underside of Magnus’ jaw. He hesitates, then kisses Magnus there, near the back of his ear and Magnus moans before he means to, his fingers fisting tight in his own jacket, the other Magnus’ jacket. His other self very carefully moves his hands to the back of Magnus’ neck, cupping his head with this almost frightened gentleness, then draws himself into a kiss.</p>
<p>The other Magnus kisses him like he’s frightened, like his skin is rice paper beneath his fingers.</p>
<p>There’s the faintest ether of static on his lip. The taste of his own magic. He’s never… you can’t usually detect that in yourself so Magnus chases that taste with his tongue, then his teeth, surging up into his other self who responds in a kind. Then he’s kissing himself with a sudden anxious desperation. It possesses them both. A wild homesickness all at once, an ache not necessarily to have the body in front of him but to inhabit and occupy that body, which is so strange because it’s his own body.</p>
<p>Five minutes is almost up.</p>
<p>His other self kisses him so hard his mouth stings, his bones ache. He grabs the other Magnus by the collar of their expensive jacket and pulls him so they stand brow-to-brow, panting, shivering, grabbing at one another with a rising urgency that Magnus is recognizing now as an approaching correction in reality. The world is bending, bowing around them as their spell breaks down. The twinned sides of his soul recognize the error and in lieu of the spell’s unraveling, press desperately together in an animal attempt to not being two things anymore.</p>
<p>Magnus hugs his other self, burying his face against his chest.</p>
<p>“It’s okay,” he’s saying to himself. “Don’t be scared. We’re fine. We’re gonna be–”</p>
<p>Reality clicks.</p>
<p>Magnus hits the floor on his knees, arms knotted around his own shoulders and his entire soul goes briefly, quietly, supernova inside him. He rides it out, barely. For a moment he just sits there, breathing slowly on the floor of his living room. There’s sun shine glowing in patches on the hardwood. His mouth aches from kissing and being kissed, his skin glows with the phantom heat of fingers on his skin, while his fingertips remember the touching. He shivers, a laugh catching in his throat, sudden warmth rushing into his eyes and running over.</p>
<p>He wipes his face with the back of one hand.</p>
<p>“I’m okay,” he says to his apartment. He sighs, sitting back on his heels, eyes closed, a band of sunshine laid over his knuckles and he says again, confidently, “I’m okay.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Valentine/Magnus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>l4g99 asked: Let's do something crazy: Valentine/Magnus</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Valentine Morgenstern knows how frustrating this must be from the perspective of someone like Magnus Bane. Bane, for all his age and power, has always been a bit of a rogue element. The price of independence. His own fault really. His credibility isn’t what it could be; his alliances with the Clave strong but not strong enough. Bane’s greatest weapon outside of his considerable magic is that people like him better than they like other people. He’s popular. A Rockstar. He’s used to getting his way. Finding his words failing now on unsympathetic ears, unmoved by any appeal to familiarity or trust?</p>
<p>It’s almost funny.</p>
<p>“Are you not hearing what I’m saying? None of that is true!” He’s so angry now he’s at that strange desperate stage between completely losing it and crying. Warlocks. The older they get, the deeper, bigger, more unwieldy their emotions. Magnus is losing control of his to the utterly calm face of Maryse Lightwood. “People are dead! Someone is doing this on purpose and you need to do something about it. I’m telling you right now.”</p>
<p>“We are looking into, Mr. Bane. As I’ve been saying for the last five minutes. Do not make me remove you from this premise. I’m sorry for your loss, but the facts of each case stand as they are until such a time as new evidence is presented.” Hell, Maryse is good. She stares down a five-hundred (six-hundred?) year old immortal who is so angry he’s starting to lose control of his glamore and she never even blinks. “We appreciate the services you’ve rendered to the Clave and your diligence as a citizen in bringing us your concerns, but these matters are being handled.”</p>
<p>Which is when Bane telekinetically snaps her clipboard into fifteen pieces, the entire things shattering like glass in her fingers.</p>
<p>“You’re not handling shit,” Bane snarls.</p>
<p>Valentine thinks he’s probably going to have to intervene.</p>
<p>Maryse, again, doesn’t flinch though every single nephilim in the room grabs for their stele. She calmly holds up one hand to stave them off, never looking away from the warlock in front of her. Magnus doesn’t back down. He really should. He’s just used magic against a shadowhunter, however cosmetically, and Valentine knows that Mayse has made actionable mountains out of less. Buried people for less.</p>
<p>But Bane’s got this look, feral, but calculated.</p>
<p>No. Not here. Bane’s got no hold at the Clave, but he’s popular enough it will cause trouble. Can’t do it like that.</p>
<p>“I will give you a warning,” Maryse says reasonably. “Next time you bring magic to bear against me, I will have to detain you. I remember the courses you taught at the Indonesian Institute. I would rather not arrest a former teacher–”</p>
<p>Magnus laughs and the whole room shivers, aches with the potential energy of his fury, a physical presence in the room. </p>
<p>“God, you grew up, huh? They could put my eyes out in front of you  and you wouldn’t flinch.”</p>
<p>Maryse narrows her eyes.</p>
<p>“The Law,” she says, “is hard, but it is the Law.”</p>
<p>“Fuck you,” Magnus says. “You’re a murderer and all the Writ in the world won’t undo it.”</p>
<p>Valentine separates himself from the doorway he’s been watching from and crosses the room. Magnus sees him coming and his expression immediately changed to relief. And why shouldn’t it? Luke and Jocelyn were favored students of his; they have him on speed dial. Too bad they’re in mission in London and won’t be back for a month.</p>
<p>“Valentine,” he says, pushing past Maryse. “I need to talk to you. No one else will listen.”</p>
<p>“Of course,” he says, clapping Magnus on the shoulder. “Apologies for the welcome. Let’s take this to a conference room.”</p>
<p>Magnus follows him. He’s agitated. A scent of static around him like its own pressure system. Valentine thinks, idly, how easy it would be to turn around and shove a seraph blade through the warlock’s stomach, wrench it up, watch every inch of magic fall to utterly useless in the face of direct action. Magnus is glancing warily at all the other shadowhunters milling through the halls of the Institute and on closer inspection it’s clear to Valentine the warlock’s not sleeping. That’s he’s ragged. Makes sense. A lot of his friends are being detained and disappearing.</p>
<p>Valentine shuts them in a conference room and Magnus immediately launches into a rant.</p>
<p>“Someone is framing downworlders. I can prove it. I have a dozen witness accounts, a forensic spell that’s admissible in court, and I’ll testify myself. Viggo and Verity were killed before those weapons were put on their bodies. This is a cover up. You have something wrong in your ranks, Valentine, and no one will listen to a downworlder, you have to—”</p>
<p>“Magnus. Calm down,” Valentine says. He crosses the room, placing a hand on the warlock’s shoulder. “I know. I know something is wrong. And I’d appreciate it if you weren’t. blowing things up in my foyer while I try to hunt it down.” He squeezes his shoulder. “It’s okay.”</p>
<p>Magnus stares. “You know?”</p>
<p>“Yes. I’m putting a stop to it.”</p>
<p>Magnus keeps staring at him, then the relief seems to catch up to him all at once and the warlock kind of falls back into one of the chairs at the nearby table, dropping his face into his hands and exhaling like he’s been holding that breath for a week. Valentine studies him. Bane isn’t that big really. A perfectly normal-looking man. Beneath the mohawk, the nail polish, the boots, the make-up, and the rage he’s actually just… this. A very stressed out and emotional creature staving off a panic attack in a conference room.  </p>
<p>“Thank god,” he says. “I thought I was going to come in here and you’d tell me I was crazy.”</p>
<p>“You’re not crazy,” Valentine says, moving to lean on the table beside Magnus. “I swore an oath to protect the people of this city. That includes your people.”</p>
<p>“Viggo and Verity were my friends, Val.”</p>
<p>“I know.” Valentine places his hand again on the warlock’s shoulder. “It’s okay. I’ve find who did this, I swear. It won’t be much longer now.”</p>
<p>Magnus reaches up, places his hand over Valentine’s. “Thank you. That… it means a lot.”</p>
<p>“No thanks needed, Magnus.”</p>
<p>The warlock looks up at him. Hmm. Valentine is old enough now to admit there are a few things he enjoys and one of them is having beautiful people looking up at him. Magnus Bane is one of the most powerful people in this hemisphere and he is, objectively, beautiful and right now he looks… ragged, exhausted, like he’s been in a fight recently, his make-up smeared from sleeping in it or going all night not sleeping and wearing it. His dark hari is touch-wrecked, the style ruined, his clothes rumpled. One could almost imagine this is what he looks like after someone fucks him.</p>
<p>Valentine wonders, idly, if Magnus’ cat eyes come out during that kind of thing or if he hides it.</p>
<p>“It is needed,” Magnus says. “The Clave needs more people like you. Looking for this. You understand. No one is infallible. Even nephilim are human and humans care capable of terrible things.”</p>
<p>“I know.”</p>
<p>“You have no idea how relieved I am. Is there anything I can do to help?”</p>
<p>“No, Magnus. You’ve done enough.”</p>
<p>Magnus stands up and before Valentine can do anything about it, the warlock pulls him into a tight embrace.</p>
<p>“Really, Val.” He seems overwhelmed, his voice raw. “Thank you. I know I can trust you to make this right.”</p>
<p>The warlock is surprisingly sturdy in Valentine’s arms. He’s so… grateful. He’s leaning against him, his head tucked against his shoulder and its very odd how human Magnus can seem. How pliable. Valentine wonders what he could do with gratefulness this complete as he stands there, comforting one of the most dangerous men in New York, imagining the look on the half-breed’s face the day he realizes the mistake he’s made. He thinks it would be so… <em>correct</em>  if Magnus would just fall to his knees right now.</p>
<p>Not for <em>that</em> (well, maybe for that) but just because that seems natural.</p>
<p>Magnus Bane built so many things for the Clave – the Portal systems, the ward walls, the rune apps, so many things. He’s so useful. He’s also still hugging Valentine long past it being strictly appropriate and Valentine should really let the warlock go. But there is something… about this. Knowing. Holding complete power over someone who has no idea, particularly someone as individually powerful as Magnus Bane – the vicious one, the summoner, binder, ward-worker.</p>
<p>Valentine suspects he could, if he wanted to, pull the warlock around and pin him to the table and he wouldn’t do anything to stop him. He won’t do anything to stop Valentine until it’s too late, the trap closing around an animal. There is a standing order, actually, not to kill Magnus if possible but to subdue him because of all the warlocks in New York… he’d have a place in the new world.</p>
<p>On his knees, of course, but a place.</p>
<p>“It’s going to be okay,” Valentine says, the way Luke or Jocelyn might. “Don’t worry, Magnus. You can rely on me.”</p>
<p>“I know.” He hugs the shadowhunter more tightly. “I know you won’t let me down.”</p>
<p>Valentine smiles.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0015"><h2>15. Magnus & Pride</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Hello! Are you still maybe-doing fic tidbits? Since it's that time of year and you reblogged the Sense8 post, I'd love to see Magnus's history at Pride. Especially if he ends up bringing Alec, because the poor boy has literally zero knowledge of gay rights history or contact w/ other gay pp (besides Underhill).</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Are you ready?” Magnus asks, beaming, his face fingerpainted in rainbow stripes, dragged from his forehead, over his right eye and down on to his cheek. He grins. He bleached a section of his bangs things morning and converted the color a perfect set of rainbow steaks to match. He looks ridiculous. He looks stunning. It’s almost enough to distract Alec. “Well?”</p>
<p>“I feel like you’re hyping this up too much,” Alec says. He, unlike Magnus, is not coloring his face with Crayola colors and is a little nervous about Magnus doing it. He won’t admit that though, so he soldiers on. “I’m gonna get there and be underwhelmed because you’re way too hype.”</p>
<p>“I feel like I can hype this up as much as I want to because I waited a million years for this kind of thing to be acceptable and I’m still thrilled about it. Don’t rain on my parade.” Then he looks absolutely delighted with himself for using the word ‘parade’ in a tangentially related sentence and Alec has to just stand there and weather the aftermath with a spartan stoicism fit for temple martyrs. “You see what I did there?”</p>
<p>“I swear to god, let’s just go.”</p>
<p>“Alexander,” Magnus says, dragging his name into a low comfort. He catches Alec’s hand, slotting his fingers neatly into his and squeezing. “If you don’t want to go, we don’t have to –”</p>
<p>Alec gamely grabs a rainbow-striped baseball cap from the kitchen table (presently stacked with a wide variety of brightly colored apparel) and jams it on his head. Magnus kind of blinks at him, standing there in his black muscle shirt and jeans, looking absolutely nervous-grumpy in a rainbow hat and Alec can see him visibly wondering if he should still let Alec off the hook. Except that seems to disappoint the warlock more than Alec knows what to do with, the fact that he’s so uncomfortable with something Magnus is so clearly excited about.ds</p>
<p>“Hey,” he says, grabbing Magnus’ wrists, gathering his hands into his. He squeezes his hands reassuringly. “It’ll be great. I just want to go with you, okay?”</p>
<p>“You don’t have to, Alec. Seriously.” He’s using his serious voice and everything. “I know this is still pretty new for you. I am perfectly fine staying in and –”</p>
<p>“No,” Alec interrupts. “No. You said you’re meeting people there. I want go. It’s fine.” He gives the warlock a lop-sided grin. “I mean, it’s not like going to your parade thing is gonna make me, you know, <em>gayer</em>at the Institute at this point. I think they know, Magnus.” And then, when Magnus remains somewhat reserved despite this, Alec reaches up and grabs a fistful of the black and rainbow T-shirt Magnus is wearing, the one he cut the sleeves out of and is looking very good in. “They know because I made out with you in front like fifty people.”</p>
<p>Magnus snorts. “Okay, okay. I really appreciate it.”</p>
<p>“Why’s it so important to you?”</p>
<p>“Alec, I was—” he hesitates for a moment— “lucky enough in some ways to have been raised to be unapologetic about who I am, but I always had the power to protect myself from anyone who didn’t like it.” He closes his eyes, dropping his chin to look at their interlocked hands. “The world’s always in flux. There were times that it was easier to be bisexual than it was to be Indonesian and times where nothing could have been more dangerous. I think it’s important to mark the times and… show your colors so to speak.”</p>
<p>He kind of smiles, but it’s a drawn kind of expression.</p>
<p>“So many of us never got that chance.”</p>
<p>Alec gently slips his fingers under Magnus’ chin, lifting his face. He waits until Magnus meets his eyes.</p>
<p>“I’m not hiding, Magnus. I know what I am and who you are. I love you. I’d put it on a goddamn billboard if that would make you happy and if anyone, ever, tries to tell you you can’t be who you are then you won’t have to use your magic to make them back off.” He leans down, carefully kissing his boyfriend, moving one hand to cup the warlock’s cheek before pulling back. “Because if anyone messes with you, I’ll mess them up.”</p>
<p>Magnus chuckles, grinning up at Alec.</p>
<p>“My knight in shining armor,” he says dryly.</p>
<p>“Hey, just because you can light things on fire with your mind doesn’t mean I can’t mess someone up in your honor.”</p>
<p>Magnus snaps his fingers and the air behind him bends, shudders, then spirals backward until it collapses into a vortex tunneling to what looks like the mouth of an alleyway somewhere in the city. He doesn’t say anything else. He just takes Alec’s hand and they step through the tunnel, Magnus pulling him into a sudden blaring raucous of cheering and music.</p>
<p>“C’mon,” he says, pulling the shadowhunter through the crowd.</p>
<p>Magnus’ hair and facepaint seem very mild suddenly because everywhere all around them the shouting, happy crowds are decked in color, bright with it, absolutely glowing with it. And suddenly they step off the curb into a flow of people and in this river of humanity massive parade floats are rolling lazily toward the downtown. There’s too much going on honestly: there a pair of girls on a tandem bicycle doing donuts in an intersection, music is roaring from a PA system somewhere, there’s a marching band dressed in rainbow stripes, there’s costumes, people yelling and through all that chaos Magnus still has his hand latched to Alec’s.</p>
<p>“You okay?” Magnus is looking at him.</p>
<p>There’s a giant papier-mâché float vomiting confetti behind him and somewhere up the street a chat is going up, “LOVE WINS MOTHERFUCKER. LOVE WINS MOTHERFUCKER. LOVE WINS MOTHERFUCKER,” before dissolving into a roar of cheers and thrown fists. Alec has no idea what’s going on honestly. He just knows there are two girls with their arms around one another and a man with confetti in his beard fondly kissing his equally lumber-jack like partner. There’s a Spanish woman in a red dress dancing by the curb, interlocked with beautiful Chinese person that could be a women or maybe not.</p>
<p>And Magnus is still holding his hand.</p>
<p>“Alec?” He looks concerned. “Are you okay?”</p>
<p>“No,” he says. The he pulls Magnus back to him, hard, hard enough the warlock kind of yelps and falls into his chest where Alec can grab hold of him, hold him there, staring up at him in surprise. “Much better,” he says.</p>
<p>Then he kisses him and he kisses him and he keeps kissing him until Magnus is gripping two fistfuls of his shirt and gasping. Alec is vaguely aware of people around them, how they barely even notice or care. Alec Lightwood stands in the middle of the streets of New York, a parade of chaos moving around him, and he kisses Magnus Bane. He’s messing up his makeup, it’s on his lips and on his fingers, color on his tongue but Magnus doesn’t seem to mind it. He swallows the taste of it, swallows the sound of Magnus saying, raggedly, against his mouth, d“I love you. I love you, Alec—”</p>
<p>Alec loses his hat somewhere in the crowd of course. </p>
<p>It’s a good day.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0016"><h2>16. Magnus/Ithuriel</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Crackship: Magnus/Ithuriel if you have some inspiration about them.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>This is it. This is how he’s going to die. Eight-hundred years and change from the heart of Indonesia. To the shore of Alicante, this is where he’s going to die. It’s Magnus’ first thought when the world cracks open a nova of starblaze beneath the ancient canopy. The effect is like a bomb going off. It blinds him so completely he can feel the inside of his retinas flare and die, leaving oily spot of darkness in this vision. The shockwave hits him like a truck and he hits the ground rolling, end over end and smashes into the foot of a cliff-face. </p>
<p>His skull slams into a jag of rock so hard his body rebounds like a thrown doll and he hits the ground finally and lies still. For a moment, there’s nothing but the black and the earth pulsing beneath him. Gravity spinning on a tether around him.</p>
<p><em>Dammit, Biscuit, </em>he thinks, dizzy, blood sliding from somewhere above his hairline.  <em>You can’t call on angels while the demonic are still among you.</em></p>
<p>He’d be angrier but he can’t feel his extremities and, frankly, when being chased by a legion of hellspawn impervious even to the most vicious of Magnus’ combat spells, there is something to be said for pulling an ace. And, really, the only reason she held off this long was for his sake. Magnus knows without seeing that the hellspawn are burning. Incinerated to dust in that single holy detonation and he, delirious, can’t help but wonder if he’s next. If the burning he feels in his nerves is the necrotic interlude to his inside liquifying, his entire body shaking apart at a quantum level because somewhere close by the angel Ithuriel has heeded the call of Clary Fray.</p>
<p>His ears are ringing. He can hear someone talking. Someone is shaking him, their fingers skating wildly cross his shoulders, his ribs, the bloody-sticky split at the top of his head and, oh, it must be a lot of blood because his rescuer starts to cry. Magnus is fading in and out, reality slipping into focus then slipping away. Clary Fray is pulling him into her arms, hooking her elbow behind him, pressing her palm against his skull.</p>
<p>She says, “Magnus? Magnus, please?” Her voice is shuddering and cracked. “No, no, no. We did it.  They’re gone. We did it. Everyone is safe. Magnus?”</p>
<p>Briefly, he can see her face, pale above him and framed by her unlikely red hair. She seems afraid.</p>
<p>He tries to tell her not to be, but the sound that catches in his throat tells him his skull is definitely cracked. Something is <em>wrong</em>. He tries to lift his hand, to just tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, but he misjudges the distance entirely, his fingers bumping her collarbone, gripping nerveless at her jacket before falling. There is something, some damage somewhere and he can’t… he can’t…</p>
<p>“Please,” Clary is begging. “Please, he’s my friend.”</p>
<p>There’s a sonic boom, a roar like a thousand claxons sounding and he cries out, his teeth aching in his skull, his entire skeleton throbbing until the speaker (because it was a voice) is splitting his already split skull like there’s prybar in his brain. Clary is screaming, curled over him, shielding him with her body, like that will do anything. The sound stops. Silence aches in the aftermath and there is nothing but the sound of Clary weeping, gently, into his hair.</p>
<p>“Please,” she sobs.</p>
<p>Again, someone speaks, but this time the frequency of their speech doesn’t rip at Magnus like atomic wind. It’s not even a sound, but a… understanding, pressed to the inside of his head in the shape of words.</p>
<p>“It is not my providence to heal your injured, my child, particularly not those of the downworld.”</p>
<p>Clary sobs.</p>
<p>“But this one…” There is a pause and Magnus feels something, a light, soft and warm, like sunshine rising through his bedroom window. Like someone is brushing fingers made of starlight against his temple. There is a sigh so deep the valley breathes with him. “I know him as I know his father. We once stood together in the silver city. I owed the one who fell when he fell beyond reaching and that debt lies between us still and into eternity unpaid. So it lies between Magnus and I.”</p>
<p>“I don’t understand,” Clary whispers.</p>
<p>“Magnus Bane is an aspect of one that I loved. And so, as I loved him, I also love the shadow.” Magnus feels the smile like you feel a wave break over your shoulders. “I will repay the debt, Clary Fray. Just this once, for him and not for you.”</p>
<p>“You… you won’t hurt him?”</p>
<p>“No. I love him, Clary, as I said. So, I cannot.”</p>
<p>Magnus feels something hot touch his cheek, so hot it burns but in the same moment it burns it heals and traps him in a strange unending cycle somewhere between pain and relief. Clary is uncurling from him, letting a canopy of light close around him instead. Someone else is cradling his neck, carefully, like you hold an eggshell in your palm, and Magnus can hear a rustle of one thousands wings, the weight of ten-thousand flaming eyes bearing down on him. He doesn’t dare look. If he sees the angel with his cat’s eyes, they’ll be burned out of his skull.</p>
<p>“Be not afraid,” says Ithurial. “Remember: those that fell were once angels. You are closer and yet farther from heaven than any nephilim.” There’s a sudden heat, like a coal against Magnus’ mouth and it hurts so much he can’t bear it, but in the same instant he would give anything for it to never end. “Know that you and your kind are awaited, one day, each of you, at the gates.”</p>
<p>Magnus can’t speak. He can’t move. There’s starlight on his tongue and humming in his soul.</p>
<p>And then it’s over.</p>
<p>The world goes dark and Magnus falls back into a fragrant patch of earth, the grass growing up from the dirt as if suffused with borrowed spring. Magnus breathes, steady, lying on his back while his body slowly, slowly ceases to resonate with the same frequency as the being that healed him. His skin still burns, not painfully, but it burns. When he presses his fingers to his lips he can feel the throb of heat still aching there in the skin, on his tongue when he brushes his fingertips against the inside of his mouth. He feels drunk, dizzy still. It takes him a minute to register that Clary is shaking him.</p>
<p>“Magnus!?” She has tears on her cheeks. “Magnus are you okay?!”</p>
<p>He tucks that bit of her hair behind her ear with one finger. “Of course, Biscuit. Don’t I look fine?”</p>
<p>She makes a strangled laugh/sob noise and collapses against his chest, full on sobbing now. “I thought I killed you!”</p>
<p>“No such luck,” he whispers. “Clary?”</p>
<p>“Yes?”</p>
<p>“Did… did you see what –?”</p>
<p>“I think he kissed you. I think that’s what healed you.”</p>
<p>“Huh,” Magnus says. He feels exhausted and not at all like he’s going to get up from this patch of grass for a while. “Everyone always said… I’d die if an angel just looked at me. Heh. How about… how about them apples? Psh.”</p>
<p>“Magnus? Wait! Don’t fall a—!”</p>
<p>He doesn’t recall anything beyond that.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0017"><h2>17. Magnus/Raj</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: magnus/raj lol</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Look, Raj is it? I understand it’s scary when your ingrained bigoty is challenged by your own higher order brain functions, but you really need to stop because, honestly, it’s just weirding me out and I have to work here. Well, no, that’s not true. I don’t have to, but the Institute pays an absolutely ridiculous sum of money for my services so it would be very awkward if I had to tell them I’m upping my prices because someone in this establishment keeps bothering me while I’m working.”</p>
<p>They’re alone in a section of hallway. Magnus is not technically allowed to wander the Institute freely but decades of familiarity and generational trust has led rather to that being, effectively, the case while relations are good between the Clave and the downworld. They’re good right now. No one is assigning shadowhunters to dog his every step on the off chance he decides to steal the good silverware or open a hell mouth in the men’s room. So there’s really no actual reason for his small, tattooed shadow this last two hours.</p>
<p>No actual reason. But probably at least one really obvious reason.</p>
<p>Raj recovers far too late to not be conspicuous. “What are you <em>talking</em> about, warlock?”  </p>
<p>“You. Following me around. No one assigned you to do it. So why are you doing it?”</p>
<p>“Because, whether my superiors think it’s important or not, I do. This Institute is my home and I want to make sure its protected.”</p>
<p>“Uh-huh. From me? Because I’m gonna, I dunno, steal all your secrets and let a Greater Demon in the back door?”</p>
<p>The shadowhunter snorts. “I wouldn’t put it past you.”</p>
<p>“Of course you wouldn’t,” Magnus sighs, “which makes me wonder what else you waste your time on. Look, Raj, I don’t have time to mollycoddle about this so I’ll just be really frank: You’re overcompensating. You’re being too mean to me. People who actually hate me are less aggressive about it than you which suggests to me you’re trying to convince yourself more than anyone. Trust me, I’ve been working with the Clave for almost two centuries now and I’ve seen it before.”</p>
<p>“I,” Raj says, winding up for a real melt down, “have no idea what you’re talking about, you–”</p>
<p>And then quite suddenly Magnus is across the space between them and slams his palm against the wall directly by Raj head. There’s a sudden mirage of kinetic force around the warlock, like a buffer zone of high pressure, shoving Raj against the fancy oak panel walls. He can’t really move and since he insisted on tailing Magnus into a back hallway, there’s no one around to see.</p>
<p>Magnus smiles at Raj. His eyes flash yellow.</p>
<p>“Little hunter,” he says. “I get that you think I’m pretty and it makes you uncomfortable because I’m a lesser being or whatever you were about to call me, but you need to <em>back off</em>.” And here the hall lights flicker and darken for just a second and the shadows kind of deepen around them before sliding back into place. Magnus smiles again, winningly, voice rising. “Got it?”</p>
<p>Raj remembers too breathe way too late.</p>
<p>“Y-you can’t talk to me like that.”</p>
<p>“I can. I did. If you want to report me or something, you can try but literally everyone likes me more than you and I’m a filthy fucking warlock, so what’s that say about you?” Magnus lets that stand for a moment, waiting for a response. Then, eventually, “Besides, I get the impression you like it when I talk to you that way.”</p>
<p>That’s apparently more than Raj can handle and he rolls sideways across the wall, away from the gravitational crush Magnus is exuding and he fairly runs down the hall. Not once looking back. Magnus waits until he’s gone before dropping his pasturing and exhaling loudly.</p>
<p>“Christ, these stupid kids,” Magnus mutters, going back to this wardwork.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0018"><h2>18. Magnus Protecting Downworld Kids Cuz The Clave Sucks</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Fic prompt: Magnus being a BAMF and defending youngster downworlders. (aka i just wanna see more magnus and magic)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Magnus’ wards go off like a vibration down a plucked guitar string. His head comes up, like a cat hearing a noise in the next room and he waits, curious, to see what’s testing his barriers. He feels it again, a vibrato traveling down his bones. He waits, frowning. Then the ward shatters and its destruction snaps through him like piano wire wound too tight to take the pressure and it lays a gash open in his mind. Something’s inside. Something’s inside the wards.</p>
<p>“Oh god,” Magnus says.</p>
<p>And the entire room immediately falls silent. Which is impressive considering the other people in the room are ten children in variable stages of eating an evening snack. Ten small terrified faces are suddenly all turned to Magnus, waiting for his signal that all their worst fears have come to pass… or not.</p>
<p>Magnus holds up a single reassuring palm: <em>Wait.</em></p>
<p>Magnus lair has been settled in this section of Dublin for a little over two years now and, really, it’s his fault. He got complacent. He casts a silence spell and sheets the walls of the common room in a layer of shimmering muffling magic. Through the one-way suppression he can hear the nephilim talking, moving through his house in quick, military precise procession. Hunting for them through his security labyrinth. If they are worth their salt (and the warlock death squads always are) they will know how to break through. But maybe, just maybe, he’s stronger than they are ready. Maybe…</p>
<p>He feels another ward break, snap like cord on a violin.</p>
<p>Magnus immediately grabs Mei, the smallest of the warlock children, and hoists her up into his arms and the rest of the kids instantly lunge up from their places to follow him. He ushers everyone toward the back door which clicks and swings open without his touching it. He herds the small group into the corridor and when they’re all through, he seals the door behind them, hides it in glamore. Not a single one of them scream or speak. He can hear a few of them sniffling. One of them has his little hands clamped over his nose and mouth.</p>
<p>This is not the first time they have done this.</p>
<p>Their fear is knife in his gut, but Magnus keeps them moving. Gently says, “Stay together. Follow Patrick okay? If anything happens to me, you all go with Patrick.” Because thirteen-year-old Patrick has no real control over any aspect of his magic except one: he can teleport and take anyone with him that he’s touching. That said…. he’s never been able to take more than five people at time but Magnus can’t think about that. “It’s okay. Just keep–”</p>
<p>There’s a slam behind them.</p>
<p>Magnus pivots, a cold fist seizing his heart. The door at the end of the corridor shudders, battered by a beast that’s found his glamore work and torn it off like wallpaper. Mei whimpers in his arms. She covers a pair of large bat-like ears that take up massive real estate on her skull and Magnus instinctively fits his hand to the back of her small, fluffy skull. Again, a thunderous bang and the door heaves on its hinges, the stone around the frame coughing dust. Another bang and the stone work cracks.</p>
<p>Magnus spins around.</p>
<p>“Run!” he hisses. “Go! Go!”</p>
<p>Something explodes. Every single security spell Magnus has laid down immediately shatters, shredded so violently the kickback snaps through him and he screams, once, surprised and hits the ground on his knees in the narrow hallway. The kids break their silence then, crying out and bursting into clumsy sprints for the door. Magnus masls the retreat in a glamore, hiding them. Then he spins around, blue fire igniting from his skin and wreathing his entire body, filling the hallways until it’s an inferno filled with flame and there, coming down the hall, are three jack-booted nephilim dressed all in black. Their seraph blades burn white hot in their fingers, bright as shards of starlight.</p>
<p>Mei screams in Magnus’ arms, grabbing his neck so tight he can’t breathe.</p>
<p>The angels don’t even hesitate. Both of the men snap forward, fast, almost vampire-fast and hurl shining seraph-stone daggers. Magnus ducks both and for a split second lets go of Mei (she’s gripping him so hard she doesn’t fall) and with a two-handed ripping motion he seizes on of them in a kinetic lasso and slams him into his partner. But its slippery. He can feel his magic sliding off them and he must abandon the spell, falling back instead on a defensive barrier, one hand held up like a shield before him.</p>
<p>He can feel the magic in their weaponry, that they are so equipped to fight a warlock – a hundred magic nullifying wards in the armor pieces strapped to them, ancient and powerful relics brought from angelic vaults specifically for this dark work.</p>
<p>One of the men starts forward again and Magnus flashes the barrier at him, a shimmer of diamond-dust magic between them, flaring in time to the gold in Magnus’ eyes. Mei whimpers and his fingers tighten gently in her hair, hugging her more tightly. Her tiny heart is a rabbit pulse against his sternum. Her hair smells faintly of vanilla and jam preserves. Her tears are soaking his shirt collar.</p>
<p>The nephlim keep closing in on him.</p>
<p>“This this an orphanage,” Magnus says. His voice crackles in his throat. His heart his pounding. Fear so strong in him it’s a razor blade sliding through the web of nerve beneath his skin. He backs away slowly but the angels follow. “<em>Please</em>!” Magnus hugs Mei tighter to his chest, feels her hook her ankles together at the small of his back, her pink shoes digging into his spine. “Don’t do this. They’re children. Orphans. They don’t have anyone else. They won’t hurt anyone. I sw—”</p>
<p>“Beg all you want, warlock,” says the leader, a blonde and blue-eyed woman gripping an electrum bullwhip in her fist. “We know what you are.”</p>
<p>“This is psychotic. You’re killing <em>children</em>!”</p>
<p>“You should have kept to yourself, Bane. Gathering up strays like this…” She shakes her head. “We’re not going to let them grow up to be like you. You did this. You killed them the moment you brought them together.”</p>
<p>“Touch them and I’ll rip you apart!”</p>
<p>“You can try, demon.”</p>
<p>Then she too lunges forward. She cracks the whip across Magnus’ shield and it tears through Magnus’ magic, eating it. She cracks the whip again and it sucks another chunk of his magic, devouring any rogue spellwork for its own vile purpose. Then she reverses her attack, the length of the weapon blazing white with holy power and this time when she cracks the whip, it ignites and the sonic boom unleashed goes off like a bomb. Magnus barely balls his body and Mei in a sheet of adamantine magic before they’re thrown down the hall with such force, the wood floor boards buckle and shred on impact. They hit the ground like a wrecking ball, rolling until Magnus can come  to his feet.</p>
<p>But the nephlim are on him.</p>
<p>The two men move together with vicious simultaneous sync, instantly. The first one drives a blade straight at Magnus’ heart only to have it slam into a chunk of wood as Magnus liquifies the floor and yanks it up between them in a geyser of repurposed matter. But the second one is around the obstacle, flash-step fast, grabbing his outstretched arm and driving the dagger down at his –</p>
<p>“NO!”</p>
<p>Mei screams and her voice, a sonic boom loosed from demonic vocal chords, shatters every bone in the angel’s hand and rips the blade from his fist. Magnus lights him on fire. It doesn’t stick to him, but it’s distracting enough the doesn’t see it when Magnus grabs the seraph blade in his fist, the weapon blazing hell-red for a split second before he nails it home through the angel’s ribcage, just south of his lungs.</p>
<p>The other male shadowhunter howls like Magnus put the blade in him too… then he goes <em>berserk</em>.</p>
<p>He hacks the liquid floorboards apart like a sapling, the whole thing exploding, his seraph blade blazing hotter than ever. Magnus can’t even follow his speed. He hits Magnus with a baseball swing from the blade and it hits Magnus’ shield like a truck, smashing Magnus sideways through the wall paneling, burying him in a splintered crater. Magnus can’t even blink and the nephlim is slamming a boot down over and over again against Magnus’ thigh, his knee, keeping him down while he brings that seraph blade down over and over and over against Magnus’ kinetic barrier. Mei is shrieking, but too scared to use her Voice again. Every blow is like a thousand pound piston coming down on him and it’s everything Magnus can do in close quarters to maintain his shield. He doesn’t have time to cast. He can’t –</p>
<p>Magnus can feel his barriers starting to shatter. He can’t get up. The force of a parabatai’s rage fueling the nephlim’s attack. He’s got both hands up, magic burning in his palms, shimmering and flaring between them. The only thing between him and the monster trying to rip him apart: a thin window of enchantment fueled by fear and desperation.</p>
<p>“Stop!” Magnus can taste blood in the back of his throat. “Stop! Please!” Mei is crying, clinging to him. This beast is going to hack straight through the both of them. “Don’t hurt her!”</p>
<p>But the shadowhunter rears back, grabs the blade in a two-hands overhead and this time he drives it straight down with an inhuman, truly monsterous amount of force and –</p>
<p>It’s just enough time for Magnus to slam his palms together and rip them apart and every single shattered piece of floorboard lying on the ground behind the man suddenly tears off the floor like shrapnel in reverse and two dozen shunts of wood slam home in the hunter’s back and ribs one punching through the back of his neck through his throat and he chokes blood. He staggers, staring wildly at Magnus… and even as he is standing there, bleeding, body perforated in a dozen places, he still tries to bring the blade down.</p>
<p>Magnus hits him with a fireball the size of an apple and it smashes him into the far wall, driving every piece of shrapnel deeper into the body cavity, rupturing violent from ribs and belly. This time the nephlim does not get up. He lies slumped with his still dying parabatai and Magnus, breathing hard through his teeth, extracts himself from the wall. By the time he stands up, his skin is sheathed again in blue flame, so hot the room it catching fire around him, the walls burning like they’re drenched in gasoline and the third shadowhunter only barely manages to grab her teammates by the arms, dragging them out of the inferno before it eats them.</p>
<p>“Fucking demon! You won’t escape! You think we came alone?”</p>
<p>“Then I’ll kill you all!” Magnus hisses, his throat full of fire.</p>
<p>“You’ll beg to die before we do it, warlock!”</p>
<p>Magnus spits on the floor on front of her and runs.</p>
<p>Mei is tucked against his chest, cradled in protective flame. He races down the hall, leaving the house to burn. He comes out into yard behind the mansion and finds five of the young warlocks still hiding in a thin sheet of invisibility. He grabs the youngest by the hand, tells the others to also take his hand and they run. Straight into the forest behind the house and as he runs Magnus says, in language 1000 years older than any other he knows, “<em>Children of the hill, you know my voice. You know my name.” </em>He can hear the house burning, collapsing behind him. <em>“There is a debt owed me. Tonight I ask it collected.”</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Magnus conjures a gold medallion. He holds it up.</p>
<p>“<em>Protect us!”</em></p>
<p>And suddenly a tall red-haired man steps from behind a tree. Magnus skids to a stop, Mei held in one arm, the medallion in his hand. The man regards Magnus from nearly seven feet of height, a giant, bearded and massive but beautiful. His eyes shine green and gold. Magnus knows his face from three hundred years ago and he offers the coin.</p>
<p>Because you can’t ask anything of leprechauns without a token of gold.</p>
<p><em>“This is yours,” </em>Magnus says, breathing hard, sweat dripping from his chin.<em>“I’m giving it back but only if you protect us. Take us away from here and across the moors. I can manage from there.”</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>The leprechaun huffs and takes the coin from Magnus’ fire-slick fingers. Unafraid of his burning. <em>“Oh. Yur gonna be trouble fer th’ world,” </em>he says in a voice that creaks with the trees. <em>“I’ll save ya, Bane. Not that I think ya need it.”</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>And suddenly they’re standing in a field and Magnus’ hand is empty, outstretched to no one. The cool wind across the empty moors ruffles his hair and the stink of smoke and fire still clings to his skin and clothes. He blinks… then kneels down immediately turns to the children huddled behind them, managing the biggest, most agonizing smile he’s ever had to fake.</p>
<p>“There we go! Safe at last. You were all so brave. Good j—!” He’s immediately swarmed by crying warlock children, nearly a dozen tiny fists closing in his clothes. A great noise of sobbing and yelling goes up. “Oh. Yes. It’s okay. I promise. They can’t follow us out here. Maria, Yuki, Lan? I need you to stop crying, okay?  Bo? Can you help me? We need to find Patrick and the others. Okay? We’re all okay. It’s okay.”</p>
<p>None of them do anything remotely like calm down, so Magnus gives up for the moment and kneels in the mud, rather ineffectively trying to hug all six weeping children as they burrow desperately against his ribs and back, like proximity will undo anything of the horror that nearly caught them. He wraps them all in a warm cloud of magic, a mirage of sunshine and pressure that hums in time to his heartbeat, pressing all of them together like small animals in a huddle.</p>
<p>“It’s okay,” he whispers. “I promise. I won’t let anything happen to you. To any of you. Okay? I won’t leave you. I’ll be here whenever you need me. C’mon.” He stands up. “I’ll keep you safe. Okay? You believe me? Okay then. Let’s go. Together now. Stay together.”</p>
<p>And Magnus Bane, with six small warlocks in tow, hikes across the moors of Ireland to find the rest of his small family.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0019"><h2>19. Magnus/Maryse</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: if you're still taking crackship prompt, magnus/maryse? idk how that would work but they are the two most gorgeous ppl on the show imo</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Maryse Lightwood asks Alec for a favor. He’s extremely wary of course and grills her for almost twenty minutes. (“Why? What do you want? I won’t let you corner him so you can give him some kind of fucked up shoved talk. Is it Clave business? It better not be. If it’s Clave business, you tell me first and then I ask Magnus you don’t go behind my back. I don’t understand. What do you mean <em>talk</em>?”) And it’s a long patient conversation before finally, with extreme and visible distrust still on his face, he texts Magnus to say:</p>
<p>
  <em>My mother wants to speak with you privately. It’s personal and she wants me to be aware you’re talking, but she wants to talk to you.</em>
</p>
<p>He hesitates then:</p>
<p>
  <em>I swear it’s not an attack.</em>
</p>
<p>And for a while there’s no response. Then a typing bubble pops up… then a gif of a confused panda with a dozen question marks bubbling out of its skull. Maryse blinks. She knows, of course, intellectually that Magnus Bane is kind of an odd person with a young/old soul but it’s something else to see an immortal (possibly one of the oldest known warlocks of the age) texting her college-age son cute reaction gifs. This is immediately followed by:</p>
<p>
  <em>Alright. I’ll forward my calendar and availabilities.</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>And then:</p>
<p>
  <em>If I disappear, you know where to send the cops lol</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The light-hearted text should not put a fucking steak knife in Maryse’s guts, but it does.</p>
<p>Alec forwards her the calendar and Magnus’ business line. (Not his personal line, she notices. She memorized all three of the numbers that spawned in Magnus’ profile the second Alec brought the screen up of course.) But she uses the business line and sets up a brunch meeting a few days later which is… a brunch meeting? She’s not sure what that signifies. Alec assures her, somewhat bemused, that a Magnus brunch meeting is typically reserved for when he doesn’t know exactly what the tone of the meeting should be and brunch is a fun word and it’s hard to stab someone over pancakes.</p>
<p>“He’s odd isn’t he?” Maryse says the day of the meeting, her phone tucked under her ear.</p>
<p>Alec snorts from the other end of the line.</p>
<p>“You know old people get kind of odd over the years and we view it as annoying because they’re old? Magnus is exactly like that but he can still do like fifteen shots and fight someone in a bar so no one notices immediately.” There’s a pause and Maryse can feel Alec replaying that in his head and regretting it. “Which is not to suggest that’s what he’s doing on a regular basis or anything.” He’s sputtering a little. “I’m just <em>saying</em>… He’s actually really boring sometimes and just wants to sit on his couch and read. It’s not—”</p>
<p>“Alec, I know. He taught at the Institute when I was still in training. I’m aware of his academic side.”</p>
<p>There’s another beat.</p>
<p>“I forgot about that,” he says quietly, almost awed.</p>
<p>“He’s been around a long time, Alec. Don’t forget that.”</p>
<p>“Well… okay. I love you both. Don’t kill each other.”</p>
<p>Maryse hangs up.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>They meet at a small coffeeshop that’s clearly run by warlocks. She orders a fruit bowl that she intends to ignore and a cup of tea. Magnus orders some kind of strawberry cream tea and nothing else so it’s clear they both know this meeting is not going to be improved by the cuteness of the word ‘brunch’ or various breakfast foods. He’s also meeting her on his turf, surrounded by his own people and that alone says a few things about where they yet stand.</p>
<p>He seems a little tense.</p>
<p>It’s strange seeing Magnus Bane up close with no other distracting factors around him like a party, general chaos, or necessity of business. He looks exactly like she remembers him from decades ago. So strange the static nature of immortality. He’s a little less punk rock perhaps, as the eighties glam thing cycled out of popular culture but it’s still there in black nail polish, the eyeliner, the ear cuff and rings. He wore a leather jacket to the meeting. There’s also a lip stud she’s never seen before and she suspects he’s a little more armored up than usual specifically because he’s meeting her.</p>
<p>(Jewelry on a warlock always holds a certain potential for enchantment. Maybe one or two of the aforementioned items are ancient tokens of power… or a shiny thing he got from a bubble dispenser in Tokyo. Who knows.)</p>
<p>The point is, he’s the same. She is not. It’s very easy to imagine his disposition has not changed at all because, visibly, he hasn’t changed at all.</p>
<p>“I admit I’m a little surprised you wanted to talk,” Magnus says finally.</p>
<p>“I admit I’m a little surprised at myself,” she says, her hands folded the table where he can see them.</p>
<p>“What is it that’s on your mind?”</p>
<p>It’s clear he thinks this is about Alec.</p>
<p>“You and I,” she says, cutting right to it. “There’s a history I need to address between us. I’ve gone this long ignoring it and that’s cowardly. Lightwoods are raised to accept consequences so I will accept yours if that’s what you want.”</p>
<p>When Magnus just blinks, she goes on.</p>
<p>“This isn’t because of Alec. It is of course, in the sense he’s forced me face this, but I’m not doing it for him. He barely understands my history. I’m his mother and he won’t…” She composes herself. “I did horrific things to you and your people and I won’t stand around while things proceed between you and him and pretend otherwise. It’s disrespectful. To you. To the people lost. To everything.”</p>
<p>Magnus doesn’t react at all. Which is, in and of itself, a reaction. His neutral expression stays that way for a very long time before, warily, slipping into a faint confusion and suspicion. His finger worries the edge of his tea cup, his ring finger running a small nervous half-circle along the rim. Maryse doesn’t stare but thinks idly that Magnus has very beautiful hands. That he <em>still </em>has beautiful hands. Much like she thought the first day he came to class, gesturing extravagantly, and the thought put a strange terror in her blood.</p>
<p>“I’m saying,” Maryse goes on, “that what I did was unforgivable and I don’t expect you to treat me differently just because Alec and you are together. I can never do anything to make up for my actions. I know that. But there is a debt between us. If there is something I can give you or do for you…”</p>
<p>Magnus stops her with a hand raised.</p>
<p>There’s a brief quiet, the soft clatter of dishes and conversation from other patrons. Magnus Bane studies her in that quiet and she waits, her heart racing faster than she thought it would.</p>
<p>“First,” he says, “there is nothing you can ever do or give me or say that is going to bring back the people I love. They’re dead. They died in terror and pain because a madman decided none of them deserved to live.”</p>
<p>Maryse nods, steeling herself.</p>
<p>“Second,” he says, “if I… if I did forgive you—” he visibly struggles with this— “it would only be because I am so angry that I can’t hold onto this kind of hatred and not go insane. I can’t. I’m too old for it. And If I do, then I’ll have to kill you and I love Alec too much and I don’t want to… give in to that.” He exhales. “People say revenge doesn’t feel good, that it leaves you hollow, but that’s not true in my experience. Sometimes it’s <em>everything</em> you ever wanted and it keeps you sane and warm at night when <em>nothing </em>else will.”</p>
<p>The way he looks at her then…</p>
<p>He’s barely recognizable – a creature suddenly composed of razor-sharp lines and <em>wanting</em>.</p>
<p>Maryse can feel the shadows in the room deepen somehow, that the dark places in the corners of the room seem to ache and hollow, developing a horrifying hunger to them that wasn’t there before. Magnus isn’t moving his hands. He isn’t casting, but nevertheless his anger is suddenly a physical presence in the room and it’s pressing against her lungs like G-force through her whole body. She can feel it – the way this might go. That he could reach across this table and wrench her heart from her ribcage and <em>like </em>it. She wonders, a little lightheaded, if he’s going to change his mind after all…</p>
<p>But then his expression shifts, becomes exhausted and the shadows recede and shallow.</p>
<p>“Third,” he says, eyes closing. He leans his weight against his forearm on the table, pressing his fingers against his temple like his head hurts. “I know something about being made into a monster by someone that you trusted to guide you.” He doesn’t elaborate. He just… sits there, looking so strangely human suddenly. Like any other person on the planet. Like… honestly like he might cry but doesn’t. He finally lifts his gaze to meet hers. “You don’t owe me anything, Maryse, because I don’t want anything from you. Just… be Alec’s mother. Be better. Don’t disappoint me again.”</p>
<p>She exhales, swallowing hard. “Before you say that… there’s something else.”</p>
<p>Magnus says nothing. His expression, previously so human, is voided now of that vulnerable exhaustion.</p>
<p>He waits.</p>
<p>Maryse, committed now, reaches under her shirt collar, pulling a small token on a chain from beneath her blouse. She doesn’t bother unlatching it but tugs it so the thin silver chain snaps and pools on the table between them as she lays it down. She uncurls her fist from around it. Lying between them on the table, unremarkable seeming, is a dull gold ring etched with Seelie script and worn by time and touch.</p>
<p>Magnus just stares at it, but she sees it – that for a split second he loses control of his cosmetic glamore and his eyes flash cat-eye gold, vertical slits in the pupil dilating wide before the glamore blinks back in place. Eventually, he takes the ring between thumb and forefinger, picking it up and lifting it, letting the chain run out of it.</p>
<p>He stares at it.  </p>
<p>“I gave this to a Circle member,” he says softly, “in Yonkers. At a black site. They had us lined up against a wall and they were going through and killing us one by one in a sealed ward room.” He’s breathing softly, shallowly, too fast. “I told them, if they would just let us go… I would give them an artifact so powerful they could extract a wish from the Seelie Queen herself… but they only let me go.”</p>
<p>He closes his hand around the ring. His knuckles go white with the pressure.</p>
<p>“It was you?” He looks up at her, his eyes burning gold. “You were the one?”</p>
<p>Maryse feels like she’s in battle. A cold adrenaline racing through her and that’s all that keeps her calm, nerve-deadened, as she answers his questions.</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“I thought I’d bribed one of the weaker ones into letting me go,” he says softly, “but you were a believer. Until the bitter bloody end, you were with Valentine. You didn’t let me go for a token of Seelie wealth.”</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>“Then why?”</p>
<p>“Because,” Maryse says, like she’s said a hundred times to him in her head, “I knew you.” And when Magnus can’t seem to find any words, just fucking stares at her with this expression of gutted horror she says, almost laughing, “Don’t you see? That’s how we made it tolerable. You could kill a hundred if you told yourself you saved the ‘good ones’. That’s how we justified it. We told ourselves we could tell the difference and then we just… kept going.”</p>
<p>Magnus shoves back from the table, violently, the chair legs scraping the floor.</p>
<p>“I have to go,” he rasps. He stands up, clumsy in his shock. There are tears in his eyes, caught on and running over his eyelashes. “Don’t… don’t say anything else, Maryse. Don’t.”</p>
<p>She doesn’t.</p>
<p>Magnus stands there, visibly caught between some animal impulse there in his eyes to just… rip her apart. He can see it, burning there in the back of his demon-gold eyes, the myriad violent possibilities of her death. But the warlock doesn’t move. He just stands there, rigored by rage or grief or some other aching emotion as he stares at his once student, once kidnapper, and (almost) his killer.</p>
<p>“Thank you,” he manages, “for telling me. A more cowardly woman would have let me forgive her.”</p>
<p>Maryse never looks away from him, accepting every inch of the way he looks at her exactly as she is, for what she is and it’s almost… almost a relief. Someone knows now. All of it. Magnus Bane’s hatred is like a knife letting poison blood from a vein, a strange pleasure in the agony of it because it’s over. He knows.</p>
<p>Magnus grabs his jacket from the back of his chair and puts it on. He’s breathing a little shakily, his hands shake a little on the zipper tab as he pulls it closed to his chin. He grabs a leather bag from the floor, slinging it over his shoulder and he turns to go… then hesitates.</p>
<p>He turns back to her.</p>
<p>“Alec doesn’t know,” he says.</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>“You want me to tell him?”</p>
<p>“I think he deserves to know… but you deserved to know first.”</p>
<p>Magnus processes that, visibly calculating. “Why was I one of the good ones?”</p>
<p>“What?”</p>
<p>“You said I was one of the good ones, Maryse. Why did you think that?”</p>
<p>And Maryse thinks, <em>Because one time, when I was seventeen, I thought your hands were beautiful.</em></p>
<p>But she says, “I don’t know, Magnus. Because you were my teacher once.”</p>
<p>He stares at her. Then, slowly, against all the odds in the universe, he comes back to the table and takes his seat again. He stares at his tea, at some middle region between her chin and collarbone because he can’t seem to look at her. The silence goes on and on and on but he doesn’t speak or raise his eyes or reach across the table and snap her neck. He just… thinks.</p>
<p>Then, quietly, he admits, “I don’t know what do, Maryse, now that I know. I hate you for this. I hated you before, but it was at least abstract now I can’t…” He rubs his face with one hand and presses his forehead into the heel of his palm, his elbow braced against the table. “It was you. You were the one.” He laughs. “You saved my life but you let my friends die. I don’t… what the hell am I supposed to do with that?”</p>
<p>“Hate me. It’s easier I think.”</p>
<p>“I don’t want to hate you,” Magnus says blankly. “I want you to be better than this. I thought the world of you once. I…” He shakes his head. “I don’t know what to do.”</p>
<p>“You don’t have to do anything,” she says quietly. “You owe me nothing. Do whatever makes you feel better, Magnus. Hate me or don’t. I’ll just… go my way and you go yours and if, one day, you decide if you need that vengeance… you’ll know where to find me.”</p>
<p>Magnus says nothing. So Maryse gets up and collects her coat. She gets her bag and she starts to walk away.</p>
<p>“Maryse.”</p>
<p>She pauses and turns around.</p>
<p>He’s holding the ring out to her.</p>
<p>“It doesn’t do anything,” he says. “It’s just a knickknack.”</p>
<p>She cautiously takes it from his fingertips.</p>
<p>“Consider it a reminder.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0020"><h2>20. Magnus/Seelie Queen</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>equusgirl asked: ...Magnus and The Seelie Queen? (I absolutely love your writing btw)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You should really eat.”</p>
<p>She says this for what seems like the four-hundredth time. This is only important because, with each progressive time she says it, her voice sounds less and less like the coy suggestion of a house hostess and more and more like the murmurs heard in a fever-dream. Likewise, with each progressive suggestion, his physical reaction to it continues to deepen because, like it or not, magic can only do so much against nature and immortal or not, warlocks are half human.</p>
<p>“I’m not hungry,” Magnus says, mostly lying to show off he can. That it’s that goddamn easy for him.</p>
<p>He can feel her smile, even if he won’t look at her.</p>
<p>“Would it really be so terrible? You spent so much time here freely, what is it to simply stay?”</p>
<p>“I’m not a play thing,” he says quietly.</p>
<p>He maintains his position, laid back in the mossy cradle of an oak tree’s roots, his back braced against the ancient trunk. The soft green cushion beneath him smells fragrantly of spring, like fresh and ever-growing life. He ignores the sensation of soft, slender fingers combing gingerly through his hair, carding his bangs off his forehead. It feels nice actually, genuinely a soothing distraction when his throat aches and his stomach is trying to eat itself. He hasn’t been hungry like this since he was a child and he actually was not prepared for the psychological toll that hunger is taking on him emotionally. To say nothing of physically.</p>
<p>Total parenteral nutrition is something possible through magic alone, but it requires a complex understanding of the human body, the make-up of vitamins and minerals, and how precisely to magically and intravenously supply those needed calories to your bloodstream.</p>
<p>Catarina could do it. She taught him only enough to survive in an emergency, enough to keep himself alive but not comfortably.</p>
<p>He’s getting tired.</p>
<p>“If you would just let me come and go and I please,” Magnus says, once more, “I’d be more inclined to spend time here as your guest.”</p>
<p>“But we love you so. I despair to be away from you.”</p>
<p>“I miss you too, but I cannot stay.”</p>
<p>“Why not? Don’t we offer the wisdom and companionship the mortal realm cannot?”</p>
<p>“We keep having this conversation. I have responsibilities.”</p>
<p>“Do you not have responsibility for your own well-being, Magnus Bane?” Her fingers are cool, soft, trailing so gently across his scalp, like you might pet a cat while you talk. She sighs. “Mortals hurt your kind. Hunt you. Torture you. Mutilate, rape, and murder you. Why would you not want to be saved from these things by a people who adore and appreciate your gifts?”</p>
<p>“Because I don’t want to be appreciated for my gifts, great queen, I want to be loved for who I am.”</p>
<p>“I love you for that.”</p>
<p>“Are you sure? Are you sure it’s not my magic or my looks or the fact I tell entertaining stories?”</p>
<p>“Are those not aspects of who you are?” She seems genuinely puzzled. “You would fault me for loving your eyes or your voice or the things that excite or annoy you? I also love these things, dear one. I love you in your anger and your joy. I even love this defiance though I would love it more if you would relent…”</p>
<p>“I don’t doubt you love me,” Magnus murmurs.</p>
<p>“Oh?”</p>
<p>“But Seelie love is fickle. You’ve said so.”</p>
<p>“All love is fickle, Magnus. Mortal love even more so. At least my people have eternity to give you.” He feels her lips against the shell of his ear, murmuring, softly, “We can offer true immortality. Lasting companionship. Undying. Unfading. A thing you’ve never truly known, my dearest one even among warlock kind you know how time erodes even them. Let us show you a world that shines eternal, little one. You’ll never ache in loneliness with us.”</p>
<p>Magnus swallows, tries to ignore the feeling of dryness, slaking the sensation with an influx of magic, drawing up power from the earth and letting it move through him like healing. He has to be so careful. He can’t conjure anything to eat or drink or digest at all. He’s so tired. He just wants to sleep, curl around that hollow ache in his belly and just try to sleep through it, but he can’t.</p>
<p>The Seelie Queen is giving him an audience and he can’t waste it.  </p>
<p>“If you tire of me,” Magnus rasps, “then I cannot leave this realm.”</p>
<p>“You would be an honored treasure among us.”</p>
<p>“I don’t want to be a treasure. I want to be a person.”</p>
<p>“You are, of course.”</p>
<p>“I’m not unfading though. You and your people walk through two-thousand years unscathed, through age after age, but there’s never been a warlock older than… well, they just don’t last that long. We’re a young people compared to you. You can’t keep me.”</p>
<p>There’s a pause and he feels fingers touch his chin, gently turning his head. He doesn’t open his eyes though. Just waits, the Queen of the Sidhe, more ancient than any other being, gazing curiously at his features. Looking for what he can’t be sure. He’s come at her in anger (screaming, demanding to be let go, with magic and fire, burning the green things around him), in despair (pleading, afraid, lonely for home, nearly weeping) in pain (because it hurts so much. Hunger burns and hollows and he can barely take it), but she’s ever unmoved.</p>
<p>He voice is music and the murmur of wind. “Look at me, great one.”</p>
<p>“I’m tired,” he whispers. “I don’t want to resist glamore right now.”</p>
<p>“I’m not using glamore, Magnus. Speak with me.”</p>
<p>And, because he can’t think of any way that might be a truth within a lie, he opens his eyes.</p>
<p>The Queen looks as she sometimes does: a pale, green-eyed woman, wild-looking, her red hair threaded through with growing things, a living crown of moss, hazel, and baby’s breath wrapping her brow. Even without glamore, his eyes are dazzled looking at her, not because her beauty is so unhuman but rather that the magic that composes a being like her is so powerful, so strange, that the magic inside him aches in proximity. In truth, her features are so extreme, he doesn’t know any other way to describe her than beautiful. Because he can’t look away.</p>
<p>She brushes the back of her fingers across his cheek, settling her palm against his jaw.</p>
<p>“Do you love me, warlock?”</p>
<p>“I suppose I do,” he says. “I kept coming here. I knew better but I kept coming to you.”</p>
<p>“And yet, you’d spurn me? Reject my gifts?”</p>
<p>“I would accept them but doing so will kill me and I do not want to die here.”</p>
<p>“I disagree. You will not die.”</p>
<p>“You’ve taken my kind before. How well do they fare now?”</p>
<p>Her eyes flicker. “You are different,” she says, very assured. “You are stronger and more beautiful than them. You will not diminish.”</p>
<p>“You over estimate me. It would take very little to drive me to despair. I don’t want to be a mad, faded thing, caged in a cold castle somewhere in the gray woods. Like a pet you refuse to put down.”</p>
<p>“You think yourself so weak?”</p>
<p>“I’m human,” he says. “My demon blood gives me magic and long life, but at the end my soul is human and we’re not made to last.” He closes his eyes again, exhausted. “Please, I can’t escape you. If you hold me here I may never see home again. I may, in time, convince myself that I can survive here and relent but I am telling you now that I won’t. I can’t. I’ll fade and you’ll fall out of love with me and I’ll be left here in the dark. So please, if you love me…”</p>
<p>There’s a quiet then.</p>
<p>A sigh.</p>
<p>“Very well, Magnus.”</p>
<p>He feels her lips press gentle to his, then her words against his tongue like an incantation.</p>
<p>“Burn brightly, beautiful one.”</p>
<p>And when he opens his eyes, Magnus is lying in the hollow at the foot of a tree in Central Park. Distantly, he can hear the clamor of bicycles and people. He can smell mud and the scent of crushed grass, a very, very faint wiff of a hot dog stand. He grabs his phone from his pocket and, free of the strange displacement of the Seelie Realm, it tells him he’s been missing for two months in the real world. His eyes sting briefly in relief.</p>
<p>He calls Catarina.</p>
<p>“Hey. I’m alive. Please don’t yell at me.”</p>
<p>There’s a quiet, then: “Your dumbass went to the Seelie Realm again.” Her told is like having a glacier be terse with you. “After I told you things were getting too familiar, you still went. You dumbshit. They sealed their realm and I knew it. I fucking knew you’d gone and got yourself stuck there with the Queen. How old are you? You know better.”</p>
<p>“Sorry. Can I come over? I’m starving.”</p>
<p>“I’ll conjure pancakes. Tell me everything.”</p>
<p>Magnus hangs up, steps sideways through reality, and leaves Central Park behind.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0021"><h2>21. Magnus/Meliorn/Jace</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: What do you think about Magnus/Meliorn/Jace?</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“So how do you know Meliorn?” Jace says, because the silence is getting too long and he can only stare silently at the back of Magnus Bane’s head for so long before it gets kind of awkward. It’s already been awkward for the entire hour and half that preceded this walk in the park, but no point in letting it get worse. Or something. Shit. He should have spoken up way earlier.</p>
<p>Magnus kind of glances over his shoulder, examining his temporary nephilim shadow. “He’s at least six thousand years old and one of the Seelie Queen’s favorite knights,” says Magnus. “It’s hard not to run into him if you have any business with the Sidhe.”</p>
<p>“Okay, so why do you need a bodyguard?”</p>
<p>“I’m pretty sure I don’t.” Magnus shrugs. “But the Seelie are less likely to misbehave with a member of the Clave standing right there staring at them.”</p>
<p>They reach the bridge that is the gap between New York and the Seelie Court and Jace feels… well, decidedly unsure what he’s supposed to do. Most of the people he sleeps with aren’t also extremely powerful downworld political figures. Much less ones that can show up in the middle of a morning briefing on completely separate business and (horrifyingly) get Jace assigned him for a personal security detail. It’s like a bad mundane sit-com. In his mind, he can see Alec rolling his eyes and saying, <em>I fucking told you so.</em>And Jace has enough self-awareness to recognize that Magnus is making him nervous because…</p>
<p>“I’m not going to mention our dalliance,” Magnus says suddenly.</p>
<p>Jace blinks.</p>
<p>Magnus is staring down into the water beneath the bridge. His expression in profile is neutral. He’s wearing this really expensive looking knee-length black jacket with silver fasters and his hair is doing this mohawk thing that makes him look like he should be on the back of motorcycle, not strolling in Central Park. His eyes flick to Jace, then away again.</p>
<p>“You’re worried I’m going to out you,” he says, faintly amused, but reassuring. “I won’t and I never would do such a thing. Though we weren’t particularly careful at the club.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, but I had a pretty good deflect attention rune going at the time.”</p>
<p>“You did indeed. Not that it had any effect on me, angel.”</p>
<p>Jace is kind of disgusted with himself that his face gets a little hot when Magnus calls him that. Though, he can’t be sure if it’s because the endearment is uncommonly sweet and he’s a goddamn sucker or because the last time Magnus was calling him that, he was also fucking Jace so hard he could barely breath and– Oh shit. Magnus is looking at him. Jace clears his throat and folds his arms.</p>
<p>“I didn’t think you were gonna out me,” he says. “Not like… you know on purpose.”</p>
<p>“Still, I understand the Clave is not as… progressive as the rest of the world is about these things at the present. Rest assured, I’m not going to make your life difficult.” Magnus shrugs. “In fact, if you should ever have troubles of the political nature during your career with the Clave, feel free to mention it to me and I will leverage what influence I do have on your behalf.”</p>
<p>Jace glances at Magnus. The warlock’s already looking sidelong at him, a little hopefully Jace thinks.</p>
<p>“I appreciate that,” Jace says, puzzled to find that he means it. “I do like to handle my own problems though. I’d feel kinda shit about putting my crap on someone I….” Jace shrugs. “You know.”</p>
<p>Magnus looks amused. “We should go,” he says, offering Jace a hand.</p>
<p>Jace blinks at him. Magnus waits.</p>
<p>Jace sighs and takes the warlock’s hand, annoyed again with himself for the way interlacing his fingers with Magnus’ has the added effect of completely flipping his stomach. He’s pretty sure Magnus can tell, but before he can think much more on that, Magnus tugs him forward and they both jump through the veil.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Jace hits the ground on his feet, the impact folding his knees slightly to absorb the shock. Magnus staggers just a little at the sudden drop, pulled off balance by Jace’s grip on his hand so, instinctively, Jace, grabs the warlock by the arm, steadying him.</p>
<p>“You good?”</p>
<p>“Great,” Magnus says. “And looks like we’re not a minute too soon.”</p>
<p>Jace glances up and sure enough, Meliorn is standing in the forest path before them, arms behind his back, watching them with a faintly intrigued expression that Jace will never be able to read properly. Something about an immortal as old as Meliorn has this bizarre… blurring effect on everything. The entire Seelie Realm feels like that. Like slipping sideways into a bit of dreamscape, making it easy to think there are no consequences for what happens in a place like this with a person like Meliorn.</p>
<p>Which is, of course, the trap.</p>
<p>“Welcome,” says Meliorn, smiling at them. He’s ethereally beautiful as always – dark hair drawn back into a series of loose braids, the lines of his face razor sharp, dark skin porelessly flawless in a way that makes him look airbrushed but in real time. It’s kind of hard not to stare. “I heard that Magnus would be bringing company. I’m delighted to meet you.”</p>
<p>Jace sighs. “Meliorn. We’ve met before. It’s me, Jace.”</p>
<p>Meliorn blinks, squinting slightly. “Oh! Even better. Hello again, Jace Wayland. I thought you looked a familiar. Prettier by far than most of the nephlim.”</p>
<p>He says that last bit like you congratulate someone for spelling a difficult word correctly.</p>
<p>“Thanks,” Jace deadpans.</p>
<p>Magnus is visibly trying not to laugh. </p>
<p>Meliorn, having appropriately disrespected a member of the Clave as usual, turns presently to Magnus and moves forward to take both his hands in his. His smile is radiantly fond and familiar. Magnus is… a little wary, but likewise warm. Jace can see that Meliorn’s grasp on Magnus’ hands slide gently along his wrists, cradling the narrow part of his arms in deceptively slender fingers. Jaces knows for a fact Meliorn can tear a car door in half if he gets a mind for it.</p>
<p>“Magnus Bane, always a pleasure.”</p>
<p>“Likewise. It’s been too long.” Magnus inclines his head.</p>
<p>“Thank you for your assistance with the vorpal pook. How long ago was that?”</p>
<p>“Forty years.” Magnus arches a brow. “But it was no trouble.”</p>
<p>Meliorn mulls that over. “Hmm, I suppose time got away from me.”</p>
<p>“Doesn’t it always. So, dear friend, what does the Seelie Queen need from the Warlock of Brooklyn?”</p>
<p>“Nothing terribly important. She recalled that we owed you’re a debt and sent me to repay it.”</p>
<p>“The Seelie Queen never owes me any kind of debt,” Magnus says quickly, almost formally rehearsed.</p>
<p>“Oh, but you’re too kind to ask for it. So, we thought a gesture of good will was necessary.”</p>
<p>“Good will?” Magnus says, wary.</p>
<p>Meliorn smiles and with a flourish, produces a small white stone in the palm of one hand. The stone is looped on a leather cord, elaborately knotted around the stone to hold it. It looks… perfectly ordinary really. Literally a rock on a rope. But Magnus looks stunned, staring at the stone, then Meliorn in shock. Meliorn rather gallantly laughs and raises the token threaded between his fingers, looped open so he can lay it over the warlock’s head and around his neck.</p>
<p>“As I said, a token of good will,” Meliorn says</p>
<p>“I can’t—” Magnus starts to stutter and, oh, wow, Magnus off his game. “I can’t possibly accept this.”</p>
<p>“You can. And you should,” Meliorn says airily. He smooths the cord around Magnus’ shoulders, along his collarbone, sliding his palms lazily across Magnus’ chest. Then with one hand, he reaches up and sets two fingertips beneath the point of Magnus’ chin, tipping his startled face up. “Lest you forget the Fair Folk hold you in dear regard.”</p>
<p>“This is the heart of Gray Castle,” Magnus whispers. “It belongs to you, Meliorn.”</p>
<p>“I only took it in the first place because I wanted to please you. It seems fitting to at last give it to you.”</p>
<p>“I never asked you to do that.”</p>
<p>“Then I did it for myself as well.”</p>
<p>“This is too rare and powerful a thing. I can’t keep this.”</p>
<p>“You can. You will. The Queen wants it in your care. Take it as you would take my very own heart, beautiful one.”</p>
<p>“Meliorn, you can’t –” Magnus starts to say, but he gets no farther because Meliorn casually closes the gap between them and kisses him.</p>
<p>Jace blinks.</p>
<p>Magnus tenses for a split second, then kind of… unwinds in Meliorn’s hands in a way that tells Jace this is definitel not the first time. His features slide into a content slack. For a long familiar moment, he just stands there, pliant, letting Meliorn slide long, certain fingers behind his skull, into his hair, his thumbs following the hard line of Magnus’ jaw until Meliorn presses forward. He eases the warlock’s mouth open before licking a lazy, indulgent heat onto Magnus Bane’s tongue and –</p>
<p>“Wait.”</p>
<p>Magnus breaks off gasping a little, pushing away and to Jace’s surprise kind of glances, embarrassed, in his direction before stepping back. Meliorn seems puzzled but otherwise unoffended. A little amused if anything.</p>
<p>“You can’t just do that,” Magnus scolds.</p>
<p>He again glances awkwardly at Jace and it takes Jace waaaay too long to realize he’s embarrassed about kissing another guy in front of him. Somehow it had not occurred to Jace that Magnus Bane of all people would be skittish about dating around simultaneously and, for fuck’s sake, they aren’t even dating.</p>
<p>While Jace is processing this, Magnus continues, “I’m just… not alone right now.”</p>
<p>“Is that an issue?” Meliorn glances curiously at Jace.</p>
<p>There’s a very long silence.</p>
<p>“Uh,” Jace says finally. “I’m here for guard duty. You get that I’m here as his bodyguard, right?” There’s a long pause in which the Seelie knight just peers blankly at him. “It’s weird to make out with the guy I’m guarding while I’m standing here.”</p>
<p>“Oh, I see,” Meliorn says, like Jace is the odd one here. “Apologies. I thought you were together.”</p>
<p>Jace blinks a few times.</p>
<p>“You thought we were together… so you kissed him while I was standing here?” Jace clarifies.</p>
<p>Meliorn nods. “Yes.”</p>
<p>Jace squints. “Are you picking a fight with me?”</p>
<p>Meliorn lights up. “Would you like you?”</p>
<p>“No!” Magnus interjects, lunging between the two of them. “No, no. We’re – haha. Not doing that.”</p>
<p>“It would be no trouble,” Meliorn reassures the warlock, like Jace just asked him for a glass of water, not a fucking fight. “A contest for your attention would be a highlight, I assure you. Jace Wayland, are you saying you would not fight for Magnus Bane? Are you not a shadowhunter? A warrior?”</p>
<p>“I’m his bodyguard. I’ll fight you if you cause trouble. I’m not fighting you because you’re bored.”</p>
<p>“Not because I’m bored, because I think you do have some affection for Magnus and he for you.” His smile is cold suddenly. “I’m telling you you’re not worthy of it.”</p>
<p>“Uhhhhh,” Jace says, folding his arms and kind of laughing. “Wow, I don’t even know where to start with that. Magnus and I met like a week ago. I don’t know where you’re getting this vibe, dude. But it’s not like–” He glances at Magnus who is distracted glaring at Meliorn, the strange light of the Seelie Realm laying bands of hazy blue light along his jaw. “It’s… uh…”</p>
<p>“Yes?” Meliorn says.</p>
<p>Jace sighs and Magnus, hearing that, looks back at him.</p>
<p>“Jace,” Magnus says, dragging the name out, a warning between his teeth. “Jace, don’t you dare –!”</p>
<p>Jace strips his jacket off. “Yeah, fuck it, I’ll fight you for him.”</p>
<p>Magnus immediately whirls around and grabs a fistful of Jace’s shirt, glaring furiously. “What the <em>hell </em>are you doing?”</p>
<p>“I dunno. I like you.” Jace jerks his chin toward Meliorn. “Not gonna let this guy talk shit about me.”</p>
<p>“This is not how you win me over!”</p>
<p>“A contest of strength?” Meliorn suggests, ignoring the warlock’s outrage. His smile takes on this wolfish edge. His hand goes then to the pommel of the sword at his hip. “Would you like to try?”</p>
<p>But before Jace can answer, Magnus grabs another fistful of his shirt and yanks him forward, so close Jace can feel the heat off the warlock’s skin. At first, he thinks Magnus is gonna threaten him… but then he makes this kind of exasperated growling noise in and pulls Jace into a single, searing kiss. His breath tastes like static, in that weird way that Magnus always seems like there’s a touch of lightning in his skin, his lip pressing into Jace until he has to give way to it and Magnus is gripping him by the back of the neck, licking away the noise Jace makes somewhere in the back of his throat. Magnus isn’t really that big of a guy. He’s not, but whenever he does this, it feels like there’s a goddamn storm front pressing the air from Jace’s lungs.</p>
<p>When Magnus finally stops, Jace is extremely embarrassed to find his knees have gone a little weak and, seriously, what the fuck is wrong with him?</p>
<p>“You’re a fucking idiot,” Magnus snaps.</p>
<p>Then he turns around, marches back to Meliorn and grabs him too.</p>
<p>Magnus snaps something, but it’s in a language even Jace’s translation rune can’t make sense of.</p>
<p>Then he yanks the Seelie knight into an absolutely ravenous kiss, dragging the other immortal to him with a furious strength that pulls a 6000-year-old being around like it’s nothing. Jace can see a lick of mirage-like heat burning now off the warlock. He claws impatiently at the front of Meliorn’s shirt, ignoring the Seelie’s low, appreciative noises. Magnus tears fabric baring his collarbone. Then he ducks his mouth there and smears a burning kiss into skin until Meliorn falls to gasping, hands sliding up to the back of Magnus’ head, holding him there until Magnus’ grabs him by the waist and –</p>
<p>Jace grabs Magnus by the shoulder.</p>
<p>He pulls the warlock back, turning him and – god – his eyes are burning gold, his face flushed in the bizarre light of this other realm, mouth kiss-bitten and slick and Jace has to kiss him immediately. Grabbing him, cradling his neck in his hands and just devouring his lips, kissing him and kissing him, until Magnus is moaning and leaning into him, pulling frantically at his shirt, but Jace just keeps kissing him. Jace barely notices or cares when Meliorn also grabs hold of Magnus, taking of his wrist and kissing his fingers, his wrist, moving to his back and Magnus bucks up, breath hitching violently in his throat until he’s moaning.</p>
<p>Meliorn’s arm is around his hip, his hand sliding down across the front of Magnus’ jeans toward the join of his thighs and Jace makes a point to shove Magnus back, pinning him against Meliorn’s chest and trapping him pressed between them.</p>
<p>“This count as a contest of strength?” Jace hisses.</p>
<p>Meliorn shoots him a look, staring at him from his place at Magnus’ shoulder. He considers it… then uses his free hand to grip Magnus’ jaw and pull his face aside so he can press another burning kiss to the warlock’s mouth, kissing him so thoroughly Magnus kind of goes weak. So Jace take the opportunity to drag his teeth across the bare arch of Magnus’ throat and take a deep satisfaction in the desperate, muffled whining noise that tears out of him. He moans until Jace starts pulling his belt open. Then he starts swearing.</p>
<p>“May the best man win,” Meliorn murmurs.</p>
<p>Jace grins and pulls Magnus belt off entirely.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0022"><h2>22. Dot/Catarina/Magnus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Dot/Catarina/Magnus: team badass warlock!!!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Catarina Loss looks like those statutes carved in Egypt.</p>
<p>You know, the kind that ancient peoples erect in the name of something unspeakable, so beautiful whole nations of men are possessed by it, the possibility in it, and tear down her temples in fear of it. There’s something archaic in the lines that compose Catarina Loss. There’s something archtypical in the shape of her lips and legendary in her eyes. When the heat of the hearth is glowing gold in the brown of her skin and bleeding warmth into her cheekbones – that’s when Dorthea feels young. The old souls keeping her company seem impossible to her and she can’t help but want the proximity to it.</p>
<p>Their cottage is snowed in.</p>
<p>They could get out of it, but there’s something charming about pretending they can’t escape one another and they, all three of them, are plenty tired of being beholden to responsibilities right now. Magnus Bane isn’t someone Dot gets to see like this very often – battle-weary and openly exhausted. It’s the first time she’s seen him injured and, from what she can tell, it’s because he gets absolutely <em>reckless </em>when Catarina is at his back, gets suicide-feral, berserker brutal. He lets himself get torn apart when he’s with Cat because Catarina makes him invincible – erases death blows in real-time from him until they’ve razed everything to the ground. Until there is nothing in their way and nothing left alive.</p>
<p>So, it’s strange now that Magnus is curled up under a quilt with his head in Catarina’s lap. He’s been dozing for hours, eyes closed, skin scrubbed bare of makeup or that sick battlefield stink of burnt hair and skin. He looks… so normal right now. Vulnerable. Like a touch-starved cat, he keeps groaning unhappily whenever Catarina neglects petting his hair or moves her hand off the back of his neck.</p>
<p>It’s hard to reconcile the sleepy creature she sees now with the burning being from the field.</p>
<p>“Dot, stop staring and get over here.”</p>
<p>Catarina is looking at her. She sets her glass down on the brick hearth, the crystal clinking lightly.</p>
<p>“C’mon.”</p>
<p>The older warlock waves a hand, beckoning, and Dot scoots a bit closer, wrapped warmly in a quilt to keep the chill off. She could use magic of course, but she’s trying to conserve it and there’s something nice about letting fire and friends keep her warm. So she takes Catarina’s hand in hers and lays down, dropping her head on Catarina’s thigh, humming contently when Cat run lazy fingers through her hair as well.</p>
<p>“Hi there,” she murmurs.</p>
<p>“Hi,” Dot says back.</p>
<p>“Did we scare you a little?”</p>
<p>Dot thinks about it. “Yes, I suppose so.” She idly fingers a bit of fabric in Catarina’s sweater, keeps her voice soft. “I’m not like you and Magnus.”</p>
<p>“How do you mean?”</p>
<p>“Powerful. I’m just not. I hate getting into fights. I get so… shaky.” She shivers. “I’m still shaky and it was you and Magnus who did all the dangerous stuff.”</p>
<p>Catarina is peering down at her, dark eyes reflecting the soft lamp light from across the room.</p>
<p>“It’s not about power,” Catarina says. She stops stroking Dot’s hair a moment, tapping a fingertip to her nose. “It’s about who and what’s in your heart and you’ve got a big one because you didn’t even want to be there and you still came. You stood with us.” She smiles but a little sadly. “You shouldn’t have had to do that. It was our battle and we dragged you into it with no cause to ask that of you.”</p>
<p>Dot pouts. “You can ask me for help. I may not be crazy powerful like you two, but I’m no slouch.”</p>
<p>Cat grins.</p>
<p>“Don’t I know it,” she murmurs, leaning down a little to press a lazy kiss to Dot’s forehead. “I saw what you did out there, pulling the roots out of the earth for us like that. Some very old school magic.” She grins wider. “I’m a healer. That’s pretty much the whole and sum of what I am, but there are certain kinds of magical practice that really…. Impress me. Old world druidic is top amongst them and that’s most certainly you.”</p>
<p>Dot blushes a little.</p>
<p>She turns her head a little to look at Magnus who’s still completely unconscious, head tucked at Cat’s crossed ankles on the floor. Her fingers are soft and dark against the curve of his forehead and in the dim firelight, Magnus looks so perfectly normal, sleepy and handsome and touchable. It wasn’t long ago, however, that he was burning. His tawny brown skin slicked in hellfire and ash. Eyes blazing molten in the recesses of his skull. The contrast is so violent it’s surreal,</p>
<p>Dot clears her throat. “You two aren’t…”</p>
<p>“No.” Cat shrugs. “We’re something but not that, at least, not one-on-one.”</p>
<p>“Oh?” Dot says, a little hopeful.</p>
<p>Cat smiles. “He likes you, you know. Particularly now that you’ve fought beside him. He’s got a weakness for pretty people who show an effort in protecting him, ridiculous as that is.”</p>
<p>“I know,” Dot snorts. “But, uh, it’s not whether <em>Magnus</em> likes me that’s on my mind.”</p>
<p>Cat keeps smiling. “Oh, really?”</p>
<p>“Really.”</p>
<p>“You got a thing for pretty warlocks who know how to fight?”</p>
<p>“I think I’ve got a thing for you,” Dot murmurs. “Both of you, just so you know.”</p>
<p>“Well, I think that’s just fine,” Cat says. “Because you’re a beautiful soul, Dorthea Rollins. You’d do us crazy wardogs good I think.” He expression softens, saddens a little. “But you should know, we’re both pretty strange in our old age. You might be better off looking to less ridiculous warlocks for whatever you’re seeking. Fair warning and all. People say I can be pretty cold sometimes and this one….” She runs a thumb fondly across the curve of Magnus’ cheekbone. “He runs too hot.”</p>
<p>Dot laughs. “You underestimate me, Catarina Loss.”</p>
<p>Cat smiles again. “Yeah?”</p>
<p>Dot reaches up, gingerly pressing a hand to Catarina’s sugar brown skin. “Yeah.”</p>
<p>Cat leans down again, kissing her on the lips this time and for a while Dorthea is certain that this is the start of some very good times. Temporary times, of course, because Cat is right about them. Magnus is nitroglycerin and Catarina inimitable a warlock as there ever was. But… for now…</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0023"><h2>23. Jocelyn/Magnus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: OMG all the crackship you write!!! Maybe Jocelyn/Magnus ?</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The day Jocelyn Fairchild met Magnus Bane things were odd and, in the short and brutal timeline of her life which will end violently and much too soon, that day stands out. She could hold it in her hand frowning at it and she knows Luke would laugh at her if she admitted it, not because Luke doesn’t understand but rather because Luke understands all too well the strange halo effect Magnus has in close quarters.</p>
<p>“It’s because he’s so damn old,” Luke would say, years after they’d abandoned the Clave for lives of phone bills and Chinese takeout. “Mortals can feel it when someone’s that old and it feels kinda wrong but interesting at the same time, y’know? Can’t help but wanna stare.” And then, after a while he’d add, “Also doesn’t help he looks, you know, like <em>that</em>.”</p>
<p><em>That</em>, being the way most shadowhunters of her age tend to remember him: grinning at them from the front of the class wearing a $5000 jacket, a Queen T-shirt, and steel-toed boots. Like he shouldn’t be there at all and it’s the compilation of contrast that baffles you – that he feels old, but looks young, that he’s that he’s heart-stoppingly stunning, but he’s a warlock. The <em>real</em> problem is just that most nephilim are raised in Alicante and never worked through their boyband phase and Magnus literally has a mohawk and three bars through his brow the first day of class.</p>
<p>He needs no introductions of course, because he’s a fixture in Clave history… and he’s wearing eyeliner and he looks pretty smug about it while their proctor glares at him.</p>
<p>“Oh no,” Jocelyn whispers. “He’s hot.”</p>
<p>Luke snorts into his hand, Valentine heaves a weary sigh, and Maryse kicks her under the desk so hard the table leg scrapes across the floor.</p>
<p>Magnus doesn’t notice, or at least he pretends not to notice and it’s very generous of him because Jocelyn would have actually died if he’d looked directly at her. Class proceeds as normal and, except for the way he looks, Magnus otherwise conducts the class with the same bored professional mien Ragnor Fell might bring to a lesson. He’s a little more restless than Ragnor. He paces while he talks, flicking a finger so a squeaky dry-erase marker scribbles notes on the board behind him while he circles the room.</p>
<p>He’s in the middle of an anecdote about rune-crafting in China when Luke finally gets bored.</p>
<p>“Do you think warlocks have ghost handwriting?” Jocelyn whispers.</p>
<p>“What?” Maryse demands, trying to keep up with her notes.</p>
<p>“You think there’s a connection between his actual handwriting and when he’s writing with magic?”</p>
<p>“I don’t… I don’t know. Why would –?”</p>
<p>“That’s an excellent question, Miss Fairchild and the answer is ‘sometimes’.”</p>
<p>Jocelyn freezes. But Magnus is still at the front of the class, idly flipping a small book in his hand while the marker squeaks on in the background, neatly writing out a few historical bullet points for memorization. Magnus stops flipping the book to level a look at poor Lucian, somewhere between annoyed at him for yapping during his lesson and, maybe, relieved for a distraction.</p>
<p>“Annotation charms are variable as the stars, if you’re curious, and each one a little different for each user.” He drops the book on the desk he’s been leaning on and rocks back onto his feet, pivoting around to approach the white board. “Watch,” he says, and lazily takes the floating marker where it’s in the middle of dotting an ‘I’… and he picks right up where it left off and there’s not visible interruption in style at all. “This one is fed pretty directly as an extension of my hand. Think of it as… a phantom limb.”</p>
<p>He tosses the marker and it stops, hanging curiously in mid-air… then goes back to writing again.</p>
<p>Magnus shrugs and leans against the desk again.</p>
<p>“Other questions?” He drums his ring-studded fingers on the table top. “I really don’t want to talk about Runic history right now. I was there for a lot of it and it doesn’t get more interesting with the passing millennia.”</p>
<p>There’s a silence, then: “So you’re technically doing two things at once,” Jocelyn says, ignoring the horrified look she gets from Maryse. “You’re teaching and walking around and stuff, but you’re also writing?”</p>
<p>“Sure.”</p>
<p>“Is multi-tasking a necessary skill for doing magic?”</p>
<p>“No, not all magic, but some. Do that long enough and you can do lots of things simultaneously.”</p>
<p>“Like?”</p>
<p>“I’m really great at patting my head while also rubbing my stomach.” Magnus looks faintly amused. When a silences starts to yawn, he sighs. “That’s it? No other questions? We have five minutes to kill.”</p>
<p>Jocelyn glances around but the rest of the class seems at a loss so… “Uh, what’s your favorite color?”</p>
<p>“Red.”</p>
<p>“How old are you really?”</p>
<p>“No idea. I’ve up and forgotten.”</p>
<p>“Did you really steal the Eiffel Tower once?”</p>
<p>“Lies and heresy.”</p>
<p>“What was it like working with Henry Branwell?”</p>
<p>“He smoked constantly and wrote his sevens with a squiggle in the middle.”</p>
<p>“You have any really good recipes for pie?”</p>
<p>They kill five minutes.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0024"><h2>24. Magnus/Lorenzo</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: i cant believe no one has said magnus/lorenzo yet....</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Fuck you,” Magnus says, dropping all the pretenses and at last giving into the impulse that’s been dogging him all damn night. It feels good. Great in fact. So satisfying he doubles down and goes on brightly, “I honestly would expect this kind of condescension from someone older than myself, but certainly not younger, and certainly not with that haircut. Synthesis magic can be automatic. I’ve seen it. You’re just wrong, And also, fuck you.”</p>
<p>Lorenzo stares at him.</p>
<p>“I see,” he says, voice chilly. He starts gathering up his notes, with his hands, not magic, just so he has time affect his annoyance for Magnus. “I’d hoped to keep this discussion civil, but I suppose that’s always a tenuous road walked in your case.”</p>
<p>“Yes. Because I’m a monster. Feel free to say it. Unless that fake high road gives you some kind of strange satisfaction in which case –”</p>
<p>“Must you always be intolerable?” Lorenzo snaps, whisking the papers away with magic this time. “I asked you here because of your expertise, but you can’t control yourself can you? I’m doing you a favor, honestly, being here, despite your childish rumor mongering and slander over the decades. I am giving you this olive branch, Magnus. Your credibility is shot –”</p>
<p>“Because you shot it,” Magnus says. He drapes his arms across the back of the sofa, posture going slack because he’s perfectly comfortable with this new dynamic, several hundred years in the making. “My credibility is shot because you shot it, Lorenzo, but I’m High Warlock of Brooklyn now so my credibility is fine, despite you shooting it.”</p>
<p>“New Yorkers hiding in your shadow is hardly the vote of confidence you think it is.”</p>
<p>“Whatever. When I submit my vote to extend protections to Hell’s Kitchen, no one is going to argue with me.”</p>
<p>“I will argue with you, even if no one else has the spine.”</p>
<p>“Do what you like. The witches deserve a voice.”</p>
<p>“They’re mortals.”</p>
<p>“They’re magic users.”</p>
<p>“Stuff-changers and fortune tellers.”</p>
<p>“Hell’s Kitchen is the safest Downworlder neighborhood in New York,” Magnus says, eyes narrow. “Their coven leaders live to be one hundred and fifty years of age. Their magic is real even if you don’t care to understand it.” He huffs. “Not caring to understand things is a specialty of yours.”</p>
<p>“They aren’t cats, Bane. You can’t collect every stray you see just because you’re High Warlock now and no one will tell you otherwise.”</p>
<p>“I don’t leave people in the cold.” Magnus inspects his nails. “I understand that’s your modus operandi, Lorenzo, but I have a higher standard for myself.”</p>
<p>“Unbelievable. You really will never let it go.”</p>
<p><br/>“Seven different warlocks tried to kill me after you outed me.” Magnus lets that kind of stand in the air between them, waiting for Lorenzo to rise to the bait, but he doesn’t. Just stands there, glaring at him, so Magnus continues, “And that was only from the handful of warlocks you told.” Magnus shrugs. “Imagine if you’d told everyone like you said you were going to.” Magnus smiles. “Or is that an axe you’re holding over my head?”</p>
<p>“Of course not. Good Lord, Bane.” Lorenzo looks horrified and offended in one singular emotion. “I didn’t know they would react that way, as I’ve said before, but the small council deserved to know before they threw their lot in with you. I did not mean for all that to happen, Magnus. Why can’t you accept that?”</p>
<p>“Because you’re not an idiot, despite my previous assertions to the contrary. You told them my father’s magic had possessed me. How exactly did you think they would react?”</p>
<p>“You father’s magic <em>had</em>possessed you, temporarily or not. They reacted as any normal warlock reacts when Greater Demons are involved: they took precaution.”</p>
<p>“You mean they all abandoned me,” Magnus cuts in. “I came to my friends for help and you advised them to turn on me. I trusted you to keep my secret. I needed help, someone on my side, and you <em>betrayed</em> me.” Magnus is not remotely smiling now. He sits forward, arms braced against his knees. “Why couldn’t you just be on my side?”</p>
<p>“Because it was dangerous!” Lorenzo says. “Because you were dangerous!” He moves to stand directly in front of Magnus, so visibly furious its hissing like static on his skin, boiling even in the thin glamore. “I didn’t believe any of us would survive being around you and I said as much. Someone needed to be the voice of reason for once.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry you felt betrayed, but in the end, you survived and so did everyone else.”</p>
<p>Magnus shakes his head. “I don’t understand you at all, Lorenzo.”</p>
<p>“I know, Magnus.”</p>
<p>“I would have never left you in the same situation.”</p>
<p>“I know. And you probably would have died. That’s my point.” Lorzeno, surprisingly, kneels down so he’s nearly eye level with Magnus rather than looking down at him. From this vantage, his expression is not any less unmovable, but it is… softer at the edges. His voice is quiet when he goes on. “You let your emotions tell you what to do when your reason should rule. You have so much power and it’s a crutch for this city to lean on. It’s why I think it’s a mistake that they made you High Warlock and I will never approve of them putting you in a position of power.”</p>
<p>Magnus stares. ‘</p>
<p>“What on earth did I ever see in you?” Magnus whispers.  </p>
<p>“Something to fix, I imagine.” Lorenzo stands up and summons his jacket, pulling it on. “I expect I’ll see you at the next city hall. I’d remind you that it’s not the province of the High Warlock to safeguard the needs of mortals and Nephilim.” He regards Magnus coolly. “But I expect you’ll do whatever you want. As usual.”</p>
<p>“Duh,” Magnus says.</p>
<p>“Well then, I look forward to debating this with you.”</p>
<p>“Likewise.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0025"><h2>25. Magnus/Alec/Meliorn</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Ok now I REALLY want magnus/alec/meliorn. My three favorite characters all together....</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Seelie culture can be somewhat inscrutable and often confusing even to creatures who’ve had centuries to acquaint themselves with the concept. Meliorn is a regular fixture at the downworld cabinet meetings and even now, he says things that baffle even Magnus who’s known the Seelie knight for the better part of five-hundred years. Sometimes, very infrequently, Meliorn brings Magnus odd tokens from the Seelie Court, ostensibly from the Queen: an acorn from a very old tree in another dimension, a necklace with the soul of a demon trapped inside, a vial of water from something called ‘the laughing brook’ which Magnus was very excited about.</p>
<p>Today, however, the meeting wraps up and Meliorn circles the table to speak with Alec.</p>
<p>“Can you spare a moment?” he says.</p>
<p>“Of course. What’s on your mind, Meliorn?”</p>
<p>Meliorn is over six-thousand years old is the rumor. Like Magnus, there’s a lot of blandish and misdirection around the Seelie knight’s actual age, but it’s undisputed that he’s been around since ancient times and while Alec has never actually seen Meliorn in a fight there’s at least one or two body-cam cuts from the mid 90’s, during The Uprising.</p>
<p>The footage shows little of what actually happened. Just the blurry glow of seraph blades lighting up a dark room and the strange almost gentle smile on the immortal’s face in the split second before he snaps out of frame, fast as a vampire, and the screaming starts. The squad was dismembered down to a man and Meliorn was pardoned in the wake of the Circle trials. Not that he seemed to notice, on account of the Seelie Queen taking him away to the fey realm and toasting his valor for a good two years.</p>
<p>Rumor was, Meliorn and Magnus worked together during the uprising. Meliorn as part of a small, shock-trooper-like division of the Queen’s personal cadre sent to New York specifically for the purpose of hunting shadowhunters. Again, rumor has it that Meliorn personally assassinated no less than forty Circle members personally in the course of the black year where Valentine’s anti-downworlder death squads ran unchecked. If asked about that time, Meliorn simply smiles and says, “It was good hunting.”</p>
<p>So, basically, it’s a little bit of a disconnect that he’s the same creature from the Clave file because Meliorn himself is not a very large person. He’s a shade shorter than Magnus and a little more wiry in build, slender and pretty, half of his head shaved down to the skin, the rest of his long hair knotted into complex black war braids – the kind that signal he’s on duty as much as the thin silver blade on his hip. His dark eyes are warm, cheerful.</p>
<p>“I have something for you.” Meliorn gestures and a small wood box appears in his palm. “A token.”</p>
<p>Magnus materialized suddenly at Alec’s elbow. “Hello. Am I interrupting?” he interrupts, smiling in that way he does when he’s detected danger and is here to head it off if necessary. He points to the box, his other hand resting on Alec’s shoulder. There’s a whiff of metal that usually signals Magnus is queuing up magic. “That’s not from the Seelie Queen is it?”</p>
<p>“Not at all,” Meliorn says, smiling magnanimously as ever. “This is from me. A personal token for Alec, in light of his work here and the work you two are doing together for the benefit of all our peoples.” A momentary pause, where his smile broadens just a little. “And because I admire you, Magnus, and want to ensure the proper gestures are made in light of that.”</p>
<p>He offers the box with a slight flourish to Alec who glances warily at Magnus. The warlock is frowning a little but gives Alec a shrug to go ahead. So, Alec takes the box from Meliorn’s palm, his fingers briefly brushing his as he takes the smooth wood container, feeling the weight of it. It’s about the size and shape of a ring box. Magnus has a few fey rings of power, actually, that he wears semi-regularly. He’s wearing one right now in fact – a plain pewter signet ring bearing the mark of a fallen Seelie house.</p>
<p>Alec opens the box… and sure enough, there is an identical signet ring, heavy, dark, carved with three vertical lines over a small oval. The moment Alec touches the metal with his fingers, he feels a bite of magic jolt across his knuckles and immediately twitches his fingers away and, alarmed, glancing at Magnus but the warlock squeezes his shoulder that it’s okay. His expression is… quiet.</p>
<p>“Meliorn,” he says quietly. “There are only five of these. Are you sure?”</p>
<p>The Seelie knight presses a hand to his heart, bowing slightly in Magnus’ direction. “As I told you five hundred years ago: I destroyed the court of Gray Castle in your name. And so you inherit the protection I earned in the destruction. No other warlock can claim so.” He looks to Alec then. “Wear it, and you may pass safely through the green places of the world. There in times of turmoil, you may call on me or the beasts of the field and they may answer you. Ravens will know your name and the kingdom of mist will recall you. Do you accept this gift?”</p>
<p>Alec, nervous at Meliorn’s tone, asks, “I don’t know if I understand what you’re saying.”</p>
<p>“It’s a ring of protection, if that’s understandable.”</p>
<p>“It’s more than that,” Magnus murmurs. “There’s magical protection, wards and the like, yes. But that’s a pledge from the undying house of mist to answer a call to arms.” Magnus’s tone carries a weight, trying to convey quickly the importance of something Alec has never heard of. “It’s like a one-time treaty, unbound by debt or transaction. A boon freely given.”</p>
<p>“The house of mist?”</p>
<p>“My house,” Meliorn says, smiling that strange, beautiful smile of his. The one that makes Alec feel like he already knows what’s going to happen. “I pledged them to Magnus three hundred years ago, but he’s never yet called on us for our good work.”</p>
<p>“Only on the darkest day,” Magnus say, “will I call on them, Meliorn.”</p>
<p>Meliorn inclines his head, hand still over his heart. “As you see fit,” he says.</p>
<p>“Why?” Alec asks, not sure if he’s being rude asking these questions. “I appreciate it, but this seems like too much. I’m just doing my job.”</p>
<p>“Agreed. But you do it in a way I admire watching and Magnus loves you. So I extend the attentions of my house to you both.”</p>
<p>Alec hesitates. “Then I suppose I accept?”</p>
<p>“I’m overjoyed,” Meliorn says, his dark eyes lighting up. “May I?”</p>
<p>“Uh…” Alec fumbles a little as Meliorn takes the box from his hand. “Okay, sure.” He looks again to Magnus but the warlock looks a little surprised too. “Should I –?”</p>
<p>Meliorn ignores him, takes his right hand, and slides the token deftly down the length of his ring finger where it fits perfectly, just a little tight at the knuckle, but resting comfortable at the base. Meliorn holds his hand for a moment, pressing his fingers over the top of Alec’s knuckles and studying his face. Alec’s never been this close to Meliorn before and he’s suddenly achingly aware of the cool warmth in his skin, the fact he smells faintly like crushed grass and rain, and his gaze makes some part of Alec’s soul shiver.</p>
<p>“You’re under the protection of a house undying,” he says. “You and everyone down your line. My only condition is this…” And here his smile takes on a sudden, bone-white edge, like the glitter of a knife in someone’s fingers. “Do nothing to willfully harm Magnus Bane or the boon is forfeit and instead you will have the wrath of my house. Do you accept?”</p>
<p>“Wait,” Magnus cuts in, frightened. “You can’t—”</p>
<p>“I accept,” Alec says immediately.</p>
<p>There’s a hiss of heat, magic sliding through Alec’s fingers and melting into his blood.</p>
<p>“Then you have the seal of Gray Castle, Alec Lightwood. Wear it well.”</p>
<p>And here, Meliorn takes Alec’s hand and turn it over, drawing Alec’s wrist up and before his eyes bending down to gentle kiss the curled fingers of his hand and it feels like a second spell, diffusing hot down the bones of his wrist into his body. His stomach turns over, once, with a dull animal heat because Meliorn looks up at him with his mouth still pressed to Alec’s skin and smiles. Then, before Alec can react, he steps away and loops his hands behind his back.</p>
<p>“Thank you, the both of you. I have to return,” he says, smiling warmly. “Good-bye!”</p>
<p>And he’s walking away.</p>
<p>“What just happened?” Alec says, glancing at Magnus.</p>
<p>Magnus has one arm looped around his middle, his other hand over his mouth, eyes wonderous and confused.</p>
<p>“Alec.” Magnus shakes his head quietly. “When I met Meliorn five hundred years ago, he declared on the spot that he was in love with me and would be for eternity. He said he’d prove it by killing his then master, the lord of Gray Castle, who’d sent him to kidnap me for his court. I thought it was some kind of… trick, but centuries later he gave me the seal of Gray Castle. He’d slain the masters of the house and taken their rings of power.”</p>
<p>Magnus jerks his chin at the ring on Alec’s hand.</p>
<p>“That’s one of them.” He holds up his hand, showing Alec an identical pewter ring. So plain and unremarkable. “This is the other. That ring is thousands of years old and signifies the fall of an immortal house in my name. I have… no idea what it means that he’s giving you one, Alec. It’s not dangerous I don’t think but… I don’t know if you should have accepted. Honestly. I’m sorry. I was so surprised I—”</p>
<p>Alec touches his shoulder. “It’s fine, Magnus.”</p>
<p>“I should have told you,” Magnus murmurs. “I just… it’s Meliorn. He’s always said he loves me. I just our dynamic. I never… he’s far, far older than me. I didn’t think he was serious. The fey are always declaring their love and doing dramatic things about it. I don’t—”</p>
<p>“I said it’s fine,” Alec laughs, pressing a hand to Magnus’ cheek. “You look so worried.”</p>
<p>“You accepted so fast,” Magnus says, scolding. “You shouldn’t have accepted his terms so quickly. It could have been binding. You should have –”</p>
<p>Alec buts him off by bending down and pulling Magnus’ lovely mouth to his and kissing away his admonition until the warlock is malleable in his hands and under his tongue. He eases up then, cupping Magnus’ face in his hands, letting the new weight of the signet ring rest against the line of his jaw. He stays near, murmuring, lips brushing the shaky edge of Magnus’ mouth.</p>
<p>“I’ll never hurt you, Magnus. So it’s no problem.”</p>
<p>“You don’t—”</p>
<p>Alec kisses him again and whatever Magnus was going to say falls away.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0026"><h2>26. Trans!Magnus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Anonymous asked: Look. You will have my undying love and gratitude if you ever wrote anything ever about trans!Magnus. Because there is just not enough of it in this fandom and you're literally my fave writer here. Like literally anything. Small oneshot? Sure. Whatever. Incorporated into something else? Yeah, okay. Just anything. I’m desperate. Your writing is amazing and i hunger for any trans!Magnus content ever. (Side note: if you can’t/won’t it’s totally cool I just thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask and/or beg. Sorry!)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Magnus gets into more fights than most High Warlocks.</p>
<p>This is one of the first things Alec learns about as he navigates the strange political and social topography of dating Magnus Bane. Among the roulette wheel of immortal faces that stand out in the Clave’s vast library of historical operators, Magnus Bane looms large. His fingerprints are everywhere now that Alec cares to look it – in their rune deployment tech, the portal system layout, the ward structures, and magic defense batteries young shadowhunters take into the field.</p>
<p>There’s a lot that Magnus has influenced. Henry Branwell saw to that – tying a warlock to the beating heart of the New York Institute in a way that horrified and enraged leadership back in the day.</p>
<p>“Brave man,” Magnus said about Henry Branwell. “There were days back then he had to bar to the door to our workroom because his colleagues wanted to come in and throw me out. One time, they were trying to kick the door down. He had to literally fistfight them in the hallway.”</p>
<p>“Really?</p>
<p>Magnus shrugged.</p>
<p>“That’s just how it was. It was one thing to call on warlocks in the field, it was another to really work with one. Henry was adamant that I complete my work. He kept saying, Magnus, they can’t kill you if you finish installing the ward system. They’ll be too scared that you’ll blow the place up.”</p>
<p>And then he laughed.</p>
<p>Alec Lightwood knows a lot of things about Magnus Bane.</p>
<p>He knows that Magnus taught shadowhunter trainees for a brief period through the eighties and nineties. He knows they pay him an average of three point five million a year to maintain the New York wards systems and the fee structure for custom portal work. He knows Magnus has fifteen recorded shadowhunter kills on file, all pre-dating the Accords or committed during the Uprising. All charges pardoned in light of circumstance. On record he said, at his court date, “Yeah, thanks.”</p>
<p>He knows they paid him a pittance in reparations in the nineteen twenties for the millions of dollars in property taken from him over the centuries and Alec knows Magnus Bane was one of the only warlocks ever paid a reparation amount.</p>
<p>Other things Alec knows:</p>
<p>He hates the smell of oranges. He’s ambidextrous. He’s won three national Lindy-Hop competitions under various aliases. He lies constantly about his age. He uses magic to style his hair and make-up, but when he’s stressed out, will do it by hand. He smells a little like ion when he uses magic and covers that with cosmetic charms and cologne. He can punch a hole in a brick wall without the aid of magic, but it will break all the bones in his knuckles to do it. He loses control of his aesthetic magic when he’s flustered. He likes it when Alec pushes him around a little. He chose the name Magnus Bane.</p>
<p>He has another name, but he’ll never tell Alec what it was.</p>
<p>“Why?”</p>
<p>“It’s dangerous and it’s not my name.”</p>
<p>“Oh.” A pause. “What do you mean?”</p>
<p>And Magnus explained it and that was that. </p>
<p>It’s ridiculous how fast a good night can go bad. </p>
<p>Magnus and Alec have a drink at a warlock-run dive bar in the Upper West Side where Magnus has a few too many gin and tonics, orders two hot fudge sundaes, and ties a cherry stem with his tongue just to show off. Then he gets in a fight with a towering warlock in town in Ireland about some ancient disagreement from the 17<sup>th</sup>century. Alec, as usual, isn’t sure if he should be interceding on Magnus’ behalf or not and so he kind of lurks in the backdrop of the argument, listening, waiting…</p>
<p>Right up until the guy from Ireland says, loudly, “Damn your dark eyes, you shifty fucker!”</p>
<p>And then he hits Magnus in the chest with a palmful of magic and knocks him spine-first into the bar. He hits the counter hard, the air knocked out of his lungs, body crackling with arcane lightning. He makes a choked, kind of panicked noise, his entire face screwing up until he’s unrecognizable in agony and –</p>
<p>Alec’s across the room, instantly.</p>
<p>There are five runes that activate automatically when his adrenaline spikes: haste, stamina, strength, and clarity. So the Irish warlock doesn’t see Alec coming until he brings an entire chair down across his back with full, devastating nephlim strength. Floors him cold in a that single blow. Then the world catches up to him and the whole bar is full of screaming. Alec tosses the chair aside and moves to Magnus, who’s still fetched up against the counter, clutching his chest, hanging there like his legs can’t take the weight.</p>
<p>“Magnus? Magnus, are you okay?”</p>
<p>He shakes his head. His fist is closed in the fabric of his jacket. He can’t seem to breath.</p>
<p>Other patrons are out of their seats, coming to check on the commotion. He can hear them muttering ‘shadowhunter’ and ‘nephlim’ and ‘what happened?’ and becomes very aware he’s the only shadowhunter in a bar full of warlocks. Magnus hooks an arm around the back of his neck, hanging his weight of Alec’s shoulders and then his mouth is against Alec’s ear, breathing static against his skin. That’s strange, Alec could have sworn Magnus had five o’clock shadow when they were kissing before but his cheek is clean shaven. What–?</p>
<p>“Get me out of here,” Magnus rasps. His voice sounds odd.</p>
<p>Alec happily obliges.</p>
<p>They’re in the street seconds later, Alec one-man walk assisting Magnus for a full block until the warlock gets his legs under him again. He keeps his arm around Alec, leaning on him for another few blocks before his breathing normalizes again. Is strange. Alec’s hyper-focused, the world jumping at him in pieces – the model and license plates of passing cars, the menu in a dinner window, the fact Magnus seems… lighter for a full block. That his wrist seems thinner in Alec’s grip, or his sports jacket a little too baggy.</p>
<p>He glances at Magnus, but he’s got his face pressed against his shoulder, so Alec can’t see his eyes or his features. He seems like he’s doing it on purpose but Alec’s worried. Magnus has magic on him still, crackling at his fingertips, in his hair.</p>
<p>“Magnus, what did he hit you with?”</p>
<p>“Cheap shot,” Magnus croaks. Again, his voice sounds wrong. “I’m okay. Give me a second.”</p>
<p>“Magnus. Here, let me—” He starts to reach for Magnus’ waist, his palm fitting to his ribs and sliding down to maybe grab his belt or –</p>
<p>“Stop! Don’t!”</p>
<p>Alec stops. He takes his hand back up to Magnus’ shoulder. Okay, there’s really something wrong with his voice. He doesn’t even sound like himself.</p>
<p>“Just… just keep walking. It’ll fade. Just…”</p>
<p>“Okay. Okay, I’ve got you.”</p>
<p>By the time they get to the end of the block, his runes are starting to disengage and Magnus’ weight feels normal again against his ribs. Magnus is shaking a little. Adrenaline shivers. He pulls away from Alec and scrubs two hands over his face, turning away from him and walking away, shoulders hunched. Alec watches him, wary, letting his boyfriend shake off whatever curse it was that other warlock hit him with. Magnus shakes his head, shakes his hands out, pats down his chest and stomach.</p>
<p>“Okay,” he says. “Okay, okay.”</p>
<p>He turns back to Alec.</p>
<p>His eyes are gold fading into brown.</p>
<p>“Sorry. I wasn’t in danger. That just threw me. I’m okay.”</p>
<p>“You’re okay?” Alec says, not moving, not sure if he’s allowed.</p>
<p>“I’m okay.” Magnus extends two hands, beckoning him back. “Sorry I snapped.”</p>
<p>Alec moves forward, fitting his hand to Magnus’ neck and he runs his thumb along his jaw which is…yes, just a little rough under the pad of his finger. Alec studies him closely. Magnus looks like himself in the glow of the street lights and storefronts – dark, focused eyes staring calmly up at him from the ageless architecture of his face. Alec, uncertain suddenly, tentatively runs his fingers along the sharp crest of his cheekbone, following the zygomatic arch around his eye, his thumb brushing Magnus’ lips.</p>
<p>“I thought… for a second…?”</p>
<p>Magnus reaches up, gently takes his hand and squeezes it.</p>
<p>“Raleigh hit me with a kind of transfiguration spell.” He says this quietly, his voice rough in his throat. Familiar now, just as Alec knows it. Magnus sighs. “I think he meant to rip my cosmetic glamore off, but he’s always been stronger than he knows how to control. Particularly drunk. His magic tends to… follow the spirit of the intention rather that the letter of the spell.”</p>
<p>“What did he mean to do?” Alec says softly.</p>
<p>“Expose me, I think. But when you’re drunk, that tends to amplify an intent.” Magnus clears his throat, wiping the back of his hand across his face. “His spell hit like a hex, so I wasn’t myself for a moment there.”</p>
<p>“You wanna talk about it?</p>
<p>Magnus hesitates. “I told you about… I haven’t always been…” He trails away. He looks uncomfortable. “You know. Like this.”</p>
<p>“What does that have to do with –?” Alec stops.</p>
<p>Oh.</p>
<p>Magnus looks… wow, <em>terrified</em>. Pale. Like he’s a little sick to the stomach.</p>
<p>Alec swallows. Quickly calculates. He’s not sure what’s the right thing here. Maybe there is no right but… he cups the warlock’s face in his hands and smiles down at him.</p>
<p>“Well, like you said: you weren’t yourself. Glad to have this face back.”</p>
<p>He leans down, slowly, just to gauge Magnus’ expression and when he sees a kind of hopeful longing, he catches the warlock’s lips against his and kisses him. Kisses him harder. Pulling him close. He waits until Magnus kisses him back, opening is mouth against Alec so he can lean into that tempting press of tongue. And then he’s backing Magnus up against a wall between a bike shop and a café. Not because he’s so desperate for it, but so he can press his body against the familiar lines of Magnus’ legs, hips, and torso. Outline him in pressure and friction, map it out for him. Make it real. Alec drags his hands down Magnus’ chest, under his jacket, over his ribs, digging his fingers into muscle and counting out every rib.</p>
<p>“You good?” Alec mumurs. “You with me?”</p>
<p>Magnus has his arms around Alec’s neck, breathing slowly against his neck.</p>
<p>“Yeah.”</p>
<p>“See. You’re right here.” He presses Magnus against the wall, lines his hips up with Magnus, holding him there. “Feel that?”</p>
<p>Magnus laughs. “Yes.”</p>
<p>Alec kisses him, his mouth, his jaw, the arch of his adam’s apple, down along his collar bone. He keeps his hand over Magnus’ heart, his palm spread over the hard plane of his right pectoral, pressing heat there. He can feel his heart beating against his ribs. Feel every breath in his lungs rising and falling.</p>
<p>“I love this face,” Alec whispers. “I love you. Okay, Magnus Bane? This is you, right here.”</p>
<p>Magnus holds onto him. “How do you know the right things to say?”</p>
<p>“I don’t. I’m just guessing. Let’s get out of here and get ice cream.”</p>
<p>“Okay.”</p>
<p>“Okay.”</p>
<p>Alec takes Magnus by the hand and they step off the curb into the night.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Series of prompts originally written on tumblr in June of 2018. Not beta'd. Posted here for archival purposes, meaning I just want to read them all easily and be able to download them in one go if I wanna.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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